Adding more Layers

Crisis "What if we jilted the ugly sisters of rdf:Bag, rdf:Alt and rdf:Alt and took reification out back and shot it? How many tears would be shed?

What if we junked classes, domains and ranges? Would anyone notice? The key concept in RDF is the relationship, the property.

The result would be a subset of RDF, RDF-lite perhaps. All instances of RDF-lite would be valid RDF-full but the converse couldn’t be true. Sparql would still work and so, I suspect, would the OWL machinery despite the omission of classes. RDF diffs would be trivial without blank nodes allowing efficient synchronisation of triple stores. Signing of triples would also be possible without requiring the hoops of canonicalisation to be jumped through."

Sunday afternoon blather "So (ramble nearly over) basically I don’t think there’s any need to define a subset or simplification of RDF because it’s already layered. You don’t need reification, ontological inferences don’t use them. If all you want to do is publish HTML with a bit of explicit data embedded, or write an aggregator that understands “rel” then fine. If you’re doing good Web stuff, you’re still helping the Semantic Web. What SPARQL brings is a low barrier to entry into the ideas, and a low barrier to development of true Web applications. I do believe SPARQL has the potential to be explosive because it makes the Semantic Web that much more agile."

This got me thinking about a conversation with Tom about the Graph interface in JRDF. It allows you to get TripleFactory (for Collections, reification, etc.) and GraphElementFactory for creating graph elements (nodes and err triples - which is now moved to TripleFactory in 0.4). It makes sense to make these decoupled to provide a tighter interface (for understandability) and less to mock out or stub out when testing.