- From: Dave Reynolds <der@hplb.hpl.hp.com>
- Date: Fri, 12 Mar 2004 10:22:23 +0000
- To: Jeremy Carroll <jjc@hplb.hpl.hp.com>
- Cc: Reto Bachmann-Gmuer <reto@gmuer.ch>, Adam Souzis <adam-l@souzis.com>, www-rdf-interest@w3.org
Jeremy Carroll wrote: > Jena attempts to implement useful behaviours licensed by the RDF > Recommendation; in this case, we could have chosen to follow the RDF > Semantics which describes bnodes as existentials and eliminated > duplicates (the work of Mugnier and Chien in the Conceptual Graph > literature on irredundancy is highly relevant). We haven't done so, not > because we take any deep position on bnode identity but because we have > limited resources, redundancy checking is slow, and we believe the final > visible end user benefit would be small. I would go further than this. We could not implement *automatic* duplicate elimination without making it impossible to use Jena in some applications. A common use for Jena, as for other RDF APIs, is for creating such things as RDF editors. These tools need to be able to treat bNodes as concrete objects which can be manipulated and don't disappear out from under you. That doesn't preclude us adding an explicit "reduce to irredundant form" operator but we have felt no particular need for one, as yet. Dave
Received on Friday, 12 March 2004 05:22:28 UTC