Re: Is everything blank?

pat hayes wrote:

>
>>  > Not sure what you mean. Certainly, it would be possible to take any
>>
>>>  OWL triple (Using Ntriples notation):
>>>
>>>  ex:foo ex:Property ex:baz
>>>
>>>  and replace it with
>>>
>>>  _:x ex:Property ex:baz
>>>  _:x owl:sameIndividualAs ex:foo
>>>
>>>  and the two are equivalent. And since they are, the second form is
>>>  kind of confusing (not wrong, but confusing) since one might easily
>>>  think, when reading it, why didn't they just write the first one?
>>
>>
>> I was thinking that a node is some abstract thing, and the name (URI,
>> QName, whatever) of a node is a property of the node.
>
>
> No, that was one way to understand RDF graphs, and it used to be the 
> 'official' way, but we realized a while ago that there was really no 
> need to distinguish between URIrefs and literals and the nodes they 
> 'labelled', so the official line now is that in these cases the URIref 
> or literal *is* the node. 


Certainly the node is not identical to the URIref string.    I cout two 
propositions in the node identified by "_:x" above and one in the node 
identified by "ex:foo" above.  I count zero propositions in the URIref 
"ex:foo".    Can't make sense that way .. well ok lets assume that the 
URIref that your talking about is not the string ... ok ... it's instead 
what the URIref denotes (the thing itself).  But that thing that the 
URIref denotes has perhaps zillions of propositions from perhaps 
zillions of points of view and does not even exist in the plain of our 
data where the URIref string is in our computer.   To me it seems like 
your are advocating the classical confusion between map and territory 
... but I'm sure that your would not make that mistake .. so how am I to 
make sense of your sentence "the URIref or literal *is* the node" ?

Seth Russell

Received on Friday, 6 June 2003 13:02:27 UTC