Re: [xtm-wg] Reification

[Dan Brickley <daniel.brickley@bristol.ac.uk>]

On Sun, 28 Jan 2001, Murray Altheim wrote:

> Paul Prueitt wrote:
> > 
> > The defintional phrase:
> > 
> >  "Reification is a process through which a computable/addressable object - a
> > resource - is created in a system, as a proxy for a non
> > computable/addressable object"
> > 
> > is perfect.
> 
> Yes, that seems basically in harmony with what we've discussed within 
> TopicMaps.Org. The editors are currently following up on our recent
> discussions in Paris and hope to add the subject explicitly to our
> specification for its next publication. As I mentioned, we'd avoided 
> it in the past due to the somewhat different concept used in RDF.

[an RDF lurker writes...]

That also seems broadly consistent with RDF's use of 'reification'
to create representations of RDF triples/statements. Perhaps the main
difference is that the RDF Model+Syntax spec only talks about the reification
of RDF statements, and not about people/places/topics etc. One problem
we have (for RDF anyway) when trying to articulate a broader notion of
reification is then in deciding where we draw the representational line between
'computable/addressable' objects and those objects that need to be
represented via a proxy / stand-in resource. People don't tend to have
URIs; mailboxes do. Physical books don't; whatever-it-is-that-URIs-name
do. And so on. If our crititeria for deciding when to call it
'reification' is related to our ability to use a URI name for the object
directly, the distinction seems somewhat fragile and
time-sensitive. Perhaps that's why RDF sticks with a more restrictive
use of the term 'reification', only applying it to the reification of
statements.

Don't know if this helps, but thought I'd chime in with an RDFish
perspective.

cheers,

Dan


------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~-~>
eGroups is now Yahoo! Groups
Click here for more details
http://click.egroups.com/1/11231/0/_/337252/_/980676571/
---------------------------------------------------------------------_->

To Post a message, send it to:   xtm-wg@eGroups.com

To Unsubscribe, send a blank message to: xtm-wg-unsubscribe@eGroups.com