- From: Jonathan Borden <jonathan@openhealth.org>
- Date: Fri, 5 Apr 2002 12:10:05 -0500
- To: "Lynn Andrea Stein" <lynn.stein@olin.edu>, "Pat Hayes" <phayes@ai.uwf.edu>
- Cc: <www-webont-wg@w3.org>, "Peter F. Patel-Schneider" <pfps@research.bell-labs.com>
Pat Hayes wrote:
>
> Heres one way to do it in RDF: have a special 'last thing' (say
> owl:LastThing) which when put into a container (which in RDF is
> essentially a sequence) indicates the 'end', like LISP NIL. However,
> unlike LISP NIL, it is only a marker; there could in fact be things
> 'in' the container past this point - which is why it doesnt introduce
> negation - ie the following would be consistent RDF:
>
> ex:seq :_1 foo .
> ex:seq :_2 owl:lastThing .
> ex:seq :_3 baz .
>
Ugggh. Regardless of whether this works semantically, it would make for some
seriously ugly looking WebOnt syntax. Some people already find the RDFisms
hard to take. To me, a strong feature of the _unexpanded_ i.e. native XML
syntax of "daml:collection" is that it uses XML as XML is meant to be used,
that is every element has an ordered sequence of children.
If you are going to the trouble to fix RDF/XML collections, please do it in
an aesthetic fashion (for those of use to whom this actually does matter)
e.g. allow:
<rdf:Seq>
<daml:Thing rdf:resource="#A"/>
<daml:Thing rdf:resource="#B"/>
<daml:nil/>
</rdf:Seq>
Of course that doesn't solve daml:oneOf, daml:unionOf, daml:intersectionOf's
problem as these are _properties_ not _typedNodes_.
Jonathan
Received on Friday, 5 April 2002 00:01:20 UTC