Re: A very basic question

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Zhu, Bin wrote:
| Hi,
|    I have a very basic question. RDF statements are all triples. But if
| I want to express "Tom borrowed a book from Mike", how do I express this
| sentence using triples?  Thanks in advance!

The usual thing is to have a bnode ("anonymous node") that has
connections on different properties to Tom, the book, and Mike -- for
example:

_:a     rdf:type     x:Borrowing
_:a     x:who        prs:Tom
_:a     x:fromWhom   prs:Mike
_:a     x:what       _:b
_:b     rdf:type     x:Book

Of course, if you just want to say that Tom borrowed *some* book from
Mike, you could also have a special property, like so:

prs:Tom   x:borrowedBookFrom    prs:Mike

but I don't think that's what you're looking for.

The "borrowing" may be a bit of a strange concept -- i.e., so see
the-book-is-borrowed as an object. An example where this maps a bit
easier to familiar concepts would be "Anna met Ginny at the office on
2004-03-14". This could be represented as

_:a    rdf:type     y:Meeting
_:a    y:person1    prs:Anna
_:a    y:person2    prs:Ginny
_:a    y:where      y:office

Here instead of the concept of a "borrowing" between Tom and Mike we
have the more familiar concept of a "meeting" between Anna and Ginny.
But really, the two are very much the same thing conceptually:
representing the relationship between different things as an object that
we can make additional connections to.

- - Benja
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Received on Tuesday, 23 March 2004 09:53:08 UTC