

Re: reification test case

From: Pat Hayes <phayes@ai.uwf.edu>
Date: Mon, 4 Feb 2002 19:30:48 -0600
Message-Id: <p0510140bb884d147f5e4@[]>
To: Brian McBride <bwm@hplb.hpl.hp.com>
Cc: w3c-rdfcore-wg@w3.org
>At 16:24 04/02/2002 +0100, Jos De_Roo wrote:
>>it of course all depends on the theory of RDF reification
>>if we want to go the way that a statement is a functional
>>property of a triple, then the answer to your question is YES
>Spot on Jos.  That is the decision I'm suggesting the WG make.
>Early votes were for making this non-functional.  DanC has pointed 
>out that his interpretation of M&S (which concurs with mine) is that 
>it is functional.
>triple as Dan pointed out.  However, the examples of reification 
>suggest its use for provenance, for which stating is more useful.

Im arriving late, but ... what exactly is a 'stating'? A kind of 
object?? If you mean a statement as opposed to something syntactic, 
then we really need to work out what is being said here. There are at 
least three things, for a start, maybe four. There is the triple, the 
proposition expressed by the triple, and the assertion that the 
proposition or triple is true. Not the same kind of thing. The last 
can plausibly be identified with a class of interpretations (those 
where the triple is true, obviously), but the second is much trickier 
kind of thing to get hold of. It would be a hell of a lot simpler to 
just say that the bnode in a reification denotes something that has 
appropriate syntactic properties. Thats all we need to know in order 
to handle entailment cases like this, and its wonderfully 
noncommittal: it just treats the reification triples like any other 
RDF triples.

>We have one URI, rdf:Statement.  We pick one concept for 
>rdf:Statement to apply to, and the other will be defined in some 
>other vocabulary(s).  Does it really matter a whole lot which is 

It does if one of them requires taking treks into foundations of 
philosophical logic in order to say what we mean.  Lets stick to 
concrete things like syntax, or else try to be as hands-off as 


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Received on Monday, 4 February 2002 20:40:09 EST
