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Could anybody be so kind to give me a simple example of reification in RDF? I want to see if I understood it correctly.
For example, I propose the following case
Tolkien -> wrote -> Lord of the rings /|\ | Wikipedia said that How would you write it with and without reification (i.e. as a simple RDF statement with no need for reification)?
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RDF Reification "Reify" means to take an abstract idea, and to make it concrete. In the world of RDF, it means to write RDF statements about RDF statements. For instance, you might have a triple: I like RDF.
Reification is a technique enabling a richer description of a property. Traditionally, “reification” has been used to support descriptions of the source of knowledge; instead of statements of fact such as “father kicked the cat”, we can say “I saw father kicked the cat”.
noun. the act of treating something abstract, such as an idea, relation, system, quality, etc., as if it were a concrete object: Defining “home” as if it were just a roof over one's head, instead of the center of a web of relationships, leads in turn to the reification of homelessness.
RDF containers are used to describe group of things. For example, to list the authors of a book or to list the members in a band. The following RDF elements are used to describe such groups: <Bag>, <Seq>, and <Alt>.
"Tolkien wrote Lord of the Rings" can be expressed as a simple statement (subject, predicate, object) like this:
:Tolkien :wrote :LordOfTheRings . By the way, this is using the Turtle notation for RDF. There are tools online for converting it to RDF/XML.
Using reification, you can have a separate resource representing a statement so you can state additional things about the statement itself, like "Wikipedia said that":
@prefix rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#> . _:x rdf:type rdf:Statement . _:x rdf:subject :Tolkien . _:x rdf:predicate :wrote . _:x rdf:object :LordOfTheRings . _:x :said :Wikipedia . In real life, you would want to use shared vocabularies, so that whoever or whatever is consuming the RDF will know that you are talking about that Tolkien and that LOTR:
http://dbpedia.org/resource/The_Lord_of_the_Rings
http://dbpedia.org/property/author
http://dbpedia.org/resource/dbppedia/J._R._R._Tolkien
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