- From: Jonathan Borden <jonathan@openhealth.org>
- Date: Tue, 5 Mar 2002 11:31:09 -0500
- To: "Peter F. Patel-Schneider" <pfps@research.bell-labs.com>
- Cc: <jos.deroo.jd@belgium.agfa.com>, <www-webont-wg@w3.org>
> > Perhaps an MT for N3 would be useful. > > > 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_. > > But RDF, can, sort of, do this. All you do is set up a bag of reified > statements. Well actually there is a lot more that you need to do if you > want to do useful things with this abilitity, without causing problems, but > that is not a syntax issue, but instead has to do with what such things > mean. From the syntactic standpoint, RDF reification is not good, because it greatly complicates the syntactic expression of an unasserted triple (e.g. one statement becomes three, hence a three fold increase in syntactic complexity). From the semantic viewpoint, the connection between a statement and a reified statement in the RDF MT does not exist or at the very least is not clear to me. I consider it _also_ a syntactic issue, because languages which have cumbersome syntaxes tend not to get used* Jonathan *the definition of cumbersome depends on the user. However, note that I do not consider XML cumbersome. I do consider RDF reification cumbersome. I assert that a language which is designed to make heavy usage of RDF reification will be cumbersome (short of changing the syntactic definition of RDF reification).
Received on Tuesday, 5 March 2002 12:41:24 UTC