Re: reification test case

From: "Peter F. Patel-Schneider" <pfps@research.bell-labs.com>

> If you read the RDF M&S there are quite clear statements of the status of
> reified statements.
>
> A statement and its corresponding reified statement exist
> independently in an RDF graph and either may be present without the
> other. [RDF M&S, 4.1]
>
> This sentence does not admit multiple reified statements for a single
> statement.

Well then that should be amended to read:

     A statement and its corresponding reified statement[s] exist
     independently in an RDF graph and either may be present
     without the other.

> RDF M&S is also quite clear that only one statement can exist with the
same
> subject, predicate, and object.
>
> There is a set called Statements, each element of which is a triple
> of the form {pred, sub, obj} [RDF M&S, 5]

There is only the one proposition .. so what?

> Just afterward there is more wording that indicates that a statement can
> only have one reification
>
> ... we can express the reification[s] of this as a new resource[s]
> ... [RDF M&S, 5]
>
> So, for any triple there is at most one statement, and for every statement
> there is at most one reification.

I fixed that too.

But the essential requirement that you will need to answer is not a
legalistic one, but a practical one.  If you throw out the ability to have
multiple descriptions of statements, then how are we to describe multiple
occurances of the same proposition relative to the contexts in which they
appear?

Seth Russell

Received on Monday, 4 February 2002 14:40:02 UTC