- From: Jonathan Borden <jonathan@openhealth.org>
- Date: Tue, 5 Mar 2002 12:55:56 -0500
- To: "Jeremy Carroll" <jjc@hplb.hpl.hp.com>, "Peter F. Patel-Schneider" <pfps@research.bell-labs.com>
- Cc: <jos.deroo.jd@belgium.agfa.com>, <www-webont-wg@w3.org>
Jeremy Carroll wrote:
> > > One of the major benefitts of N3 over
> > > RDF (including N-Triples) is the simple ability to write down a set of
> > > statements _without asserting them_.
>
>
> What are the use cases for this ability?
Basically anywhere you see (in N3) { ... } a context is defined in which the
contents are not necessarily asserted.
Perhaps the simplest use of this is an IF THEN statement or an OR statement
IF {sky color blue} THEN {trees color green}
OR { [sky color blue] [sky color grey] [trees color green] [trees color
brown] }
or
FORALL ?x such that [?x color blue] => [mary likes ?x]
A simple way to write down a simple formula is the use case.
>
> What I have seen so far is the desire to state logical entailments.
>
> This is quite addressable outside RDF rather than inside the graph.
> The N3 version could be modelled in RDF as a load of triples, with N3
> contexts roughly corresponding to bags of reified triples in RDF.
Yuck!
A simple syntactic device for making a simple IF THEN statement seems like a
useful thing.
Jonathan
Received on Tuesday, 5 March 2002 12:22:52 UTC