Re: Reification Quoting in RDF/N3

Jon Awbrey wrote:
>Dan Brickley wrote:
> >
>.......>
> > <#pat> <#knows> <#jo> .
> > <#pat> <#age> "24" .
> >
> > The verb "knows" is in RDF called a "property"
> > and thought of as a noun expressing a relation
> > between the two.  In fact you can write
> >
> > <#pat> <#child> <#al> .
> >
> > alternatively, to make it more readable, as either
> >
> > <#pat> has <#child> of <#al> .
> >
> > or
> >
> > <#al> is <#child> of <#pat> .
>
>Now, this thing that was just done here,
>of passing from an expression of the form
>
>"<#pat> <#child> <#al> ."
>
>to an expression of the form
>
>"<#pat> has <#child> of <#al> ."
>
>if it is permissible for us, at least, in the present context, anyway,
>to use our own nearly unlimited resources of quotation marks that way,
>
>well that is just what Perseans -- and I think most other logicians
>of the philosophical persuasion -- call "reification", in the sense
>of making, or at least marking, an "abstractive hypostasis" (AH),
>as I prefer to talk about it, or a "hypostatic abstraction" (HA),
>as it is more commonly called.

I don't see any quotation or reification involved here. I took this 
to mean only that there were several alternative syntactic forms for 
a simple assertion of a triple, much as English has active and 
passive voices for representing the same proposition in two different 
ways. One doesnt need to get into reification in order to allow 
alternative syntactic forms.

Reification only comes into the tutorial document later, when it 
refers to 'contexts'.  I'll comment on that in another message.

Pat Hayes

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Received on Friday, 19 January 2001 13:53:32 UTC