- From: Pat Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us>
- Date: Thu, 1 Jul 2010 22:44:48 -0500
- To: Jeremy Carroll <jeremy@topquadrant.com>
- Cc: Yves Raimond <yves.raimond@gmail.com>, Toby Inkster <tai@g5n.co.uk>, David Booth <david@dbooth.org>, nathan@webr3.org, Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org>, Linked Data community <public-lod@w3.org>, Semantic Web <semantic-web@w3.org>
- Message-Id: <A08FB053-0BD6-4591-9208-B115D6DA0493@ihmc.us>
Jeremy, your argument is perfectly sound from your company's POV, but not from a broader perspective. Of course, any change will incur costs by those who have based their assumptions upon no change happening. Your company took a risk, apparently. IMO it was a bad risk, as you could have implemented a better inference engine if you had allowed literal subjects internally in the first place, but whatever. But that is not an argument for there to be no further change for the rest of the world and for all future time. Who knows what financial opportunities might become possible when this change is made, opportunities which have not even been contemplated until now? It is also important to distinguish changes which actually harm your code, and changes which simply make it less complete. Allowing literal subjects will not invalidate your engines in any way: it will simply mean that there will be some RDF out there which they may be unable to process, or which might require them to do some preprocessing (such as replacing <literal> :p :o . with _:x :p :o . _:x :same <literal> . with a special company-specific :same property marker. For example.) But none of this *invalidates* your huge pile of expensive investment in code base; it merely makes it just a wee bit obsolete. But by the time this process is over, it will be obsolete anyway, I am sure, simply by virtue of being about four or five years older. Best wishes Pat On Jul 1, 2010, at 10:38 AM, Jeremy Carroll wrote: > > I am still not hearing any argument to justify the costs of literals > as subjects > > I have loads and loads of code, both open source and commercial that > assumes throughout that a node in a subject position is not a > literal, and a node in a predicate position is a URI node. > > Of course, the "correct" thing to do is to allow all three node > types in all three positions. (Well four if we take the graph name > as well!) > > But if we make a change, all of my code base will need to be > checked for this issue. > This costs my company maybe 100ドルK (very roughly) > No one has even showed me 1ドルK of advantage for this change. > > It is a no brainer not to do the fix even if it is technically correct > > Jeremy > > > ------------------------------------------------------------ IHMC (850)434 8903 or (650)494 3973 40 South Alcaniz St. (850)202 4416 office Pensacola (850)202 4440 fax FL 32502 (850)291 0667 mobile phayesAT-SIGNihmc.us http://www.ihmc.us/users/phayes
Received on Friday, 2 July 2010 03:46:52 UTC