

Re: RDF graph representation

From: Paul Gearon <gearon@ieee.org>
Date: Fri, 23 Jul 2004 14:34:28 +1000
Message-Id: <9570C212-DC61-11D8-81F6-000D93B0E8B6@ieee.org>
To: www-rdf-interest@w3.org

On 23/07/2004, at 5:45 AM, Dimitri Glazkov wrote:

> This may be a bit of sophistry, but since predicate may be used as
> node-arc-node representation of a triple invalid?
> For instance, how would you represent an OWL property restriction in
> such a graph mode? Wouldn't this mean that you'd have to point an arc
> into the middle of another arc?
> Or am I missing something here? (which is probably the case)
> Illuminate me please..

It seems that everyone I know who is learning RDF and tries to draw a 
ball and stick diagram runs into this problem (I know I did).  People 
invariably seem to end up putting "balls" onto the middle of their 
arcs.  :-)

A traditional directed graph has homogeneous edges, which have no 
function except to connect the vertices.  These graphs are a 
2-hypergraph, since each edge connects just 2 vertices.

RDF is more properly a 3-hypergraph as its edges connect 3 vertices.  
To quote Wikipedia:

"A property of graphs that encourages their study, is that it is easy 
to draw a representation of them on a piece of paper. This is not so 
for hypergraphs and so their study tends to be conducted using the 
nomenclature of set theory rather than the more pictoral descriptions 
(for instance 'trees','forests' and 'cycles') of graph theory."

So the problem is that we are trying to represent a 3-hypergraph as a 
pseudo 2-hypergraph by labelling the edges.  As a tool it mostly works, 
but gets a little messy when statements are made about predicates.  It 
gets even messier with the concept of reification, as using identifiers 
to represent statements starts delving into 4-hypergraphs, which get 
even harder to represent pictorially.

Paul Gearon

Software Engineer
Tucana Technologies

immane mittam.
Received on Friday, 23 July 2004 01:22:39 UTC
