3 ms·

It is unclear to me what it would achieve compared to a spog (subject, predicate, object, graph) based representation like it exists in RDF based triplestores.

by ta988 6y ago

breck 6y ago
Yes you are right. Semantic triplets are great. I think the semantics are largely the same. Here's my work in progress argument for why this is relevant. My take with ontologies is building consensus is hard. Tree Notation offers a solution to the problem of: what should we agree on for the encoding? I assume that simpler is better, all else being equal. Then Tree Notation is the simplest, in terms of the thing with the fewest pieces(tokens). To get to Tree Notation, nothing was added, only stripped. I started with an existing notation and stripped away each visible syntax token that wasn't needed. Surprisingly, not one is needed. Not one quote, parens, bracket, colon, etc. So now if we can get consensus around going with the simplest thing, we have got a way to agree on an whether we should use XML, JSON-LD, turtle, etc. The simplest thing works (which would be Tree Notation, or a close relative—someone can rebrand the notation but the idea is largely the same). This does not suffer from the 927 problem, as there are a few classes of things where we do have 1 new language that is mathematically superior and of a different kind than others (binary notation, for example). So after you have agreement on that encoding, versioning and forking and merging schemas is dead simple (just use Git—in Tree Notation all changes are semantic and noise free). So now we've solved what encoding to use for our ontologies, and we have a very fast and efficient way to collaborate on them (it's just plain text and git). That brings us to a third advantage which is more theoretical. Tree Notation maps words/nodes to a 3-D representation. This means that there would be an X-Y-Z isomorphism with an ontology and the real world. I don't really know where we go from there, but at least by this point we've moved the semantic web idea a lot further and can start looking at the next realm of possibilities.

It is unclear to me what it would achieve compared to a spog (subject, predicate, object, graph) based representation like it exists in RDF based triplestores.

by ta988 6y ago

It is unclear to me what it would achieve compared to a spog (subject, predicate, object, graph) based representation like it exists in RDF based triplestores.

breck 6y ago

Yes you are right. Semantic triplets are great. I think the semantics are largely the same. Here's my work in progress argument for why this is relevant. My take with ontologies is building consensus is hard. Tree Notation offers a solution to the problem of: what should we agree on for the encoding? I assume that simpler is better, all else being equal. Then Tree Notation is the simplest, in terms of the thing with the fewest pieces(tokens). To get to Tree Notation, nothing was added, only stripped. I started with an existing notation and stripped away each visible syntax token that wasn't needed. Surprisingly, not one is needed. Not one quote, parens, bracket, colon, etc. So now if we can get consensus around going with the simplest thing, we have got a way to agree on an whether we should use XML, JSON-LD, turtle, etc. The simplest thing works (which would be Tree Notation, or a close relative—someone can rebrand the notation but the idea is largely the same). This does not suffer from the 927 problem, as there are a few classes of things where we do have 1 new language that is mathematically superior and of a different kind than others (binary notation, for example). So after you have agreement on that encoding, versioning and forking and merging schemas is dead simple (just use Git—in Tree Notation all changes are semantic and noise free). So now we've solved what encoding to use for our ontologies, and we have a very fast and efficient way to collaborate on them (it's just plain text and git). That brings us to a third advantage which is more theoretical. Tree Notation maps words/nodes to a 3-D representation. This means that there would be an X-Y-Z isomorphism with an ontology and the real world. I don't really know where we go from there, but at least by this point we've moved the semantic web idea a lot further and can start looking at the next realm of possibilities.