rat10
commented
3 years ago William gave a short overview of the experience with "Formulas" in Notation3 in todays call [0], especially how referential opacity allows them to implement, compare and experiment with different interpretations of RDF data. I 've been meaning to ask about their experience with referential opacity for a long time (but failed) and I found what I heard indeed very interesting and attractive. However I'd like to stress that the scenario is quite different to RDF-star: N3 formulas are graphs that stand for themselves. They can be understood as self-contained theories. They essentially refer to themselves. N3 provides mechanisms to control and express the chosen interpretations. Interpreting them in different ways can sure be helpful and an adequate way to explore viewpoints etc. Embedded triples on the other hand are a small syntactic element that connects a statement with an annotation - a self-describing statement identifier. They can hardly be understood as self-contained. They are terms and as such can only occurr embedded in statements. RDF-star provides no means to control their interpretation. [Now insert here the whole sermon on how everything else around them is referentially transparent and how odd it is and how brittle references become if only they are referentially opaque...]
[0] https://w3c.github.io/rdf-star/Minutes/2021-05-14.html, quite at the bottom
As discussed during today's call, this issue is a placeholder for discussing the relationship between Notation3 and RDF-star.
Note that there is a symmetrical issue on the N3 repo: https://github.com/w3c/N3/issues/27