DISQUS

"Any others?"

Yes:

http://laurentszyster.be/blog/public-names/

of course ;-)

Public Names provide a data model that:

1. Captures simple text articulation as unique
sets of strings in a single semantic field,
for instance (with CRLF added):

17:
6:Public,
5:Names,
,
15:
4:data,
5:model,
,
1:a,
7:provide,
4:that,

2. Allow a simple computer system to validate
a string of bytes as an *unambiguous* text
articulation, for instance:

5:Dawes,4:Phil,

and use them as Unique Resource Identifier
with the required properties for a semantic
application.

Kind Regards,

Simplification of RDF/XML without URI constraint for subject, predicate or objects is a good idea. But I have to disaggree on this:

"statement order in a graph is maintained"

Because there is little semantic to be found in a sequence of XML elements and it's a big restriction on its practical usage.

An XML element tree can represent sets of hierarchical relationships, display ordered sequence, but making an assumption about the meaning of a sequence restricts the liberty of the author to change this order of elements. That's exactly why XML is so popular: it is less complex than SGML and provides a more flexible text format than *fixed* position records or flat database interchange formats.

The first example XML string with your name and e-mail address could be rewritten as:


pdawes@users.sf.net


explicitely assign the name "Phil Dawes" as the context of the e-mail address .

Or vice-versa, using a well-supported URL,

Phil Dawes

A metabase (a semantic server, a metada management system) should not re-articulate the information submitted. It is up to the application or its users to produce well articulated statements.

By the way, I tried to send you a private mail to but that did not work out so well. The mailer at sf.net bounced it back.

Kind Regards,

"Also, why bother with the netstring numbers? - for the sake of simplicity, why not (apple,computer) or something?"

Because articulated text is not made of sequence of byte strings, but like you understood as *sets* of text. For instance, the sentence:

Steve Jobs is the creator of the Apple Computer

may be articulated (considering "the", "is" and "of" as
articulators and with CRLF added for readability) as the Public Name:

15:
5:Steve,
4:Jobs,
,
19:
5:Apple,
8:Computer,
,
7:creator,

Sorted sequence of netstring effectively represent the three sets of text:

((Steve, Jobs) creator (Apple, Computer))

and actually preserve the semantic between those sets expressed by the original text articulation.

Public Names have many other interesting properties: they can be used as URI, can be used to build fast indexes and can encode any 8-bit byte strings.

URI are not appropriate for the Semantic Web, Tim Berner Lee wrote that himself back in 2001:

http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/HTTP-URI.html

section 2.5 - Extra info with URI:

"Effectively, the URI scheme has now failed to identify anything by itself."

This issue and others have since then not been addressed, although context was forced in RDF store implementation and semantic patched on RDF/XML with Named Graphs.

As a data model for the Semantic Web, RDF triple is just broken, it is too simple.

Have a look a:

http://laurentszyster.be/blog/public-names/

and

http://laurentszyster.be/blog/public-rdf/

then tell me what you think.