Re: ISSUE-47: Is MODIFY syntax required?

On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 6:57 AM, Kjetil Kjernsmo <kjetil@kjernsmo.net> wrote:
> On Tuesday 20. October 2009 09:43:11 SPARQL Working Group Issue Tracker
> wrote:
>> ISSUE-47: Is MODIFY syntax required?
>>
>> http://www.w3.org/2009/sparql/track/issues/47
>
>
> Yes, I posted this problem to my colleagues a while ago, and this was the
> main thing they disliked about SPARUL, so this post
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-dawg/2009AprJun/0315.html
> is relevant to both ISSUE-47 and ISSUE-48, I believe.

While I agree that it's often intuitive to think of "changing a
triple", the fact is that RDF statements either exist, or they don't.

It's tempting to think of changing a property of a resource once a
schema exists, but schemas are above the level of RDF. Even so, the
theory seems unclear to me, since RDFS cannot prevent both property
values from being stated at once. OWL may impose restrictions of
cardinality and disjointness that imply that a particular property on
a subject can only be described once, and a delete/insert may be
thought of as a "changing statement", but that's at an even higher
level than RDFS.

This is just a roundabout way of saying that I don't want to see a
concession to the view of changing a triple. Yes, it meets some
people's (incorrect) expectations, but it goes against the
expectations of everyone who knows what's really going on. Isn't
better documentation the correct solution here?

Regards,
Paul Gearon

Received on Tuesday, 20 October 2009 14:29:51 UTC