Extra! Extra! Reification has been shot!

It all begun yesterday when Lars “Ontopian” Garshol brought up the question that brought reification out in the open for everyone to notice. It definitely was not the time to do this, Joshua had already made the crowds very antsy after bringing up the question whether we should adopt provenance as a first-class citizen. However, what Lars did was inevitable, it just had to happen. It was a simple question with humble notation that started it all:

If I create an RDF node that reifies the statement:

(winston, married-to, clementine)

What does that node represent? Specifically, does it represent the statement that these two are married, or does it represent the marriage relationship between them? That is, if the reifying RDF node is X, which of the following two statements wouldn’t make sense?

(X, start-date, 1908-09-02)
(X, according-to, wikipedia)

PFPS “The Logician”, answered with a resounding NEITHER!. This was a low-blow but it wasn’t deadly that’s for sure. Brian enters the scene and while recovering from a bump in the head during his ride to the airport in Nice, France, he tries to make it all clear and avoid the much larger altercation. Brian definitely does make it clearer and puts it in a way that we can all finally understand reification by saying:

The answer is no. X represents the stating of the statement, or the occurrence of the statement, not the statement itself.

Lars praises Brian’s act and showing his new found knowledge in the ways of the RDF Model Theory says:

Ah, I see. This was very clear. So X represents a stating, and there can be many statings of the same statement, in the sense that I could state it today, and you may have stated it yesterday, giving us two statings of one statement?

Everything seemed like it was going to be ok, but it was already too late. First, PFPS starts an erotic linguistics colloquium where the excursus focuses on Jane Austen, Sherlock Holmes, ejaculate, erections and their usage through time. At the same time, Henry armed with N3 tries to rally support for it in the name of Sir TBL and before we know it, PFPS takes him into the darkside of FOL. Reification was alive, but hurting, when Brickley looking all innocent, uses his marriage registry expertise to deliver the ultimate blow. In a very well setup study, he shows everyone how much damage the improper use of reification could cause in the world. For example, a world where Charlie is married to Mary and Bob to Alice, a question can be ask in the presence of a single owl:sameAs relationship, with an answer being Charlie married to Alice. Adultery for heaven’s sake! We don’t want this to happen, we won’t let it happen. Therefore, Brickley had to do what he had to stop it:

My preference is simply to never use the W3C RDF reification vocab, and to use other mechanisms for keeping track of ‘who said what’….

There you have it, we would have thought that it would have been Ian who shot reification and its ugly sisters, but it was Brickley who did it in front of everyone. Moral of the Story: If you want to avoid confusion, use a URI, then we can all talk about you or it without worrying about having to make “de re/de dicto” distinctions, and of course, use SPARQL it’s good for the soul, says Steve. Apologies to the readers for not taking advantage of the situation and made extensive use of reification in this post, it just would have made sense.