[redland-dev] Parsing RDF

[Richard Newman]

> Are we saying that the definition of the "source" is not part of  
> the OWL or
> RDF spec, and that there really isn't any true meaning or  
> declaration of
> source in the RDF?  I'm not an expert on RDF or OWL at all, you  
> people would
> probably be far more knowledgeable than I.

Correct.

It's quite handy, so most tools provide some facility for it. SPARQL  
includes named graphs, which is a move towards mainstreaming the idea.

> Tools such as Protégé and SWOOP seem to have a very clear  
> partitioning with
> regards to a triple's source, and present the triples, classes,  
> individuals,
> properties, etc. clearly as belonging to a particular source.
>
> So hence, this is where the confusion begins.

Hopefully this is where it ends.

RDF is *triples*. Redland allows you to store *quads*, so you may  
store the URI of a named graph in which the triple is stored, or the  
URI from which it was retrieved.

Some toolkits allow you to make mappings from a local copy of a file  
to its original retrieval URL, in which case you could store that, too.

The RDF model theory itself, though, has no concept of sources.

-R