

Re: Reification - whats best practice?

From: Thomas B. Passin <tpassin@comcast.net>
Date: Wed, 01 Sep 2004 19:57:58 -0400
Message-ID: <41366206.1000200@comcast.net>
To: www-rdf-interest@w3.org

Hamish Harvey wrote:
> As to verbosity, for statements about statements it perhaps doesn't get 
> much less verbose than this, but to say that "X said <all this>" where 
> <all this> is a graph the named graphs approach would seem to have an 
> edge (no pun intended).

Well, yes, if we had a good way to identify and name a subgraph that 
would take care if it.  I'm not convinced I've seen that yet.  FOr 
example, using a document as a subgraph and attaching meta data to a 
node whose identifier is the uri of the document just isn't kosher, 
because rdf per se does not know when a uri is supposed to mean the 
graph in a dereferencable document and when it doesn't.

OTOH, I can also imagine defining a class of resources for which - by 
definition - their identifier *does* match up with their content.  Then 
such a scheme would work, at least if you want to create an actual rdf 
document for each case and if you can figure out how to make it all work 
in an rdf data store, which would have to import the subgraph and match 
it against the main graph but still keep it separate somehow.


Tom P

Thomas B. Passin
Explorer's Guide to the Semantic Web (Manning Books)
Received on Wednesday, 1 September 2004 23:56:02 GMT
