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W3C's Notation 3 (N3) Community Group
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a variable that is both universally and existentially quantified #200

Open pfps opened 1 year ago

pfps commented 1 year ago

There does not appear to be any requirement that the universal and existential variables of a graph are disjoint.

This makes the definition of isomorphism suspect as ({x},{x},{(x,:knows,:plato)}) apears to have the same meaning as ({},{x},{(x,:knows,:plato)}). Similarly the definition of normalization is also suspect. (Or maybe it is just normalization that should be changed.)

doerthe commented 1 year ago

Even with this interesting observation, the definitions as they are are still correct: ({x},{x},{(x,:knows,:plato)}) is isomorphic to ({y},{y},{(y,:knows,:plato)}) but not to ({},{x},{(x,:knows,:plato)}) The normalization of ({x},{x},{(x,:knows,:plato)}) is ({x},{x},{(x,:knows,:plato)}) . From that perspective nothing is broken.

What is indeed counter intuitive and could (or even should?) be changed is that the normalization is defined in a way that it should remove all quantification variables which are not used when determining the semantics and the example shown contains the unused quantification set U={x}, that could be improved.