- From: Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org>
- Date: Sun, 4 Mar 2001 18:18:43 -0600
- To: <jos.deroo.jd@belgium.agfa.com>, <mdean@bbn.com>
- Cc: <www-rdf-logic@w3.org>, <boley@informatik.uni-kl.de>
> We have been playing a bit with your GEDCOM example. > We actually rewrote it in N3 and the relations are at > http://www.agfa.com/w3c/euler/gedcom-relations.n3 The gedcom example got me looking around the Euler stuff again, and it reminded me of something I find odd there... the use of statements that seem to "return" values, ala functional terms; e.g. | {<#x> :in {<#x> :list <#b>}} log:forAll <#b>, <#x>. -- http://www.agfa.com/w3c/euler/lists.axiom.n3 It seems that {<#x> :list <#b>} is being used as a term, as if :list is a 2-place function that returns a list. That doesn't really fit in RDF does it? RDF only has predicates, not functions, no? Ah... this is actually documented: | Operations are described with {subject operator object} log:implies result. statements. | Operators are e:plus, e:minus, e:star, e:slash, e:lt, e:lte, e:gt, e:gte, e:eq, and e:neq. -- http://www.agfa.com/w3c/euler/ The lt, lte, gte, eq, and neq symbols fit; they're relations. But e:plus doesn't; plus, as a relation, is ternary: plus(4, 3, 7) meaning "7 is the sum of 4 and 3." In playing around with n3, we came up with a couple idioms for this. One is to encode "a sum of 4 and 3" as [a :Sum; :of 4; :and 3], combined with knowledge that there is exactly one such sum. If you make the domain of :of and :and be :Sum (aka :Integer) and recall that = denotes daml:equivalentTo, you can write "the sum of 4 and 3 is 7" as [ :of 4; :and 3 ] = 7. The other idiom is somewhat more traditional, making use of the list syntax-sugar in n3, where (a b) denotes the same thing as [ daml:first a; daml:rest [ daml:first b; daml:rest daml:nil ]]. Using that, we can write "the pair 3,4 has sum 7: as (3 4) :sum 7. Oops... I've been using decimal numerals as terms, which isn't (yet?) part of n3. So that should actually be (i:_3 i:_4) :sum i:_7. or some such. McDermott's proposal a while ago had another approach to functional terms in RDF, but it used more than syntactic sugar... http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-logic/2000Dec/0044.html http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/dvm/daml/proposal.html > -- > Jos De Roo, Agfa http://www.agfa.com/w3c/jdroo/ -- Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
Received on Sunday, 4 March 2001 19:24:02 UTC