RDFCore Update

The minutes of the RDFCore WG face to face meeting 

  http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/RDFCore/20010801-f2f/

have just been approved and this seemed like a good time to report on our
progress.

Most of the people I have spoken to have said we had a good meeting and we
have made good progress.  Pat Hayes presented a strawman model theory for RDF.
which was well received.  This is a technique borrowed from the logicians
which provides a formal mathematical foundation for RDF.  I am hopeful that
this will prove to be a useful technique for grounding many of the semantic
issues that have arisen.

We did spend a lot of time discussing anonymous resources, but it was time
well spent as this was an issue that the WG had been struggling to move
forward on email and teleconferences.  In the end we made significant
progress, deciding that anonymous resources are indeed part of the RDF
model, not just syntactic entities.  We also made good progress with
understanding their semantics.

Other decisions the WG made include:

  o The model theory will be defined for RDF graphs, not n-triples.

  o Multiple domain and range constraints are permissable and will have
conjunctive
    semantics and this issue is now closed.

  o The issue rdfs-primitive-properties is not a problem and will be closed.

  o subProperties inherit conjunctively the domain and range of their
superproperties

  o The WG will not address the rdfs-versioning issue

  o The WG closed the issue rdfs-constraining-containers on the grounds that no
compelling case had been made for including this feature and that we already
allow
subclasses of containers.

We have subsequently closed the issue rdfs-transitive-subSubProperty which asked
whether a subProperty of a transitive property must be transitive.  The answer
is no and Jan Grant gave a compelling counter example.  ancestorOf is a
transitive property.  parentOf is a subProperty of ancestorOf.  parentOf is not
transitive.

We are now working on getting some working drafts together.  We expect an RDF
model WD, a syntax WD and a test cases WD.  We'll look forward to your comments.

Brian McBride
RDFCore co-chair

Received on Tuesday, 28 August 2001 11:08:13 UTC