Re: semantics and RDF(S)

"Peter F. Patel-Schneider" wrote:

> Sure there is a mapping from RDF and RDF Schema documents into triples, but
> this is nowhere near a semantics for RDF and RDF Schema.  A semantics would
> provide a meaning for RDF containers---one that would settle matters of
> whether two bags are the same, whether a container can contain itself, what
> alternative means, whether a container can have missing elements, and what
> distributive statements mean.  A semantics would provide a meaning for
> reifications.  It would answer questions about the relationship between a
> statement and its reification.  A semantics would provide a notion of
> equality for rdfs:Classes.

Well said, and thanks for saying it.   One trouble with RDF containers is that
they are not the containers we need.  We need a container that contains
statements (triples).  But since in the RDF model there is no way to reference
a particular statement (a statement cannot be an object), there is no way to
make a collection of statements ... the best we can do in M&S is to make a
collection of reified statements ... well it's not the same thing.

topic: Seth Russell
workingOn: http://RobustAI.net/MyNetwork/index.html
workingOn: SW browser

Received on Friday, 12 January 2001 09:16:46 UTC