One of the advantages of bNodes is that they don't have names so that people can't add things to them. This is useful in the case of RDF Collections and in places of the OWL spec where you can use them to say that 'these things are in the collection' and others can't add to them.
On Mon, Aug 25, 2014 at 11:17 AM, Ruben Verborgh <ruben.verbo...@ugent.be> wrote: > >> bnodes are Semantic Web, but not Linked Data. > >> If a node doesn't have a universal identifier, it cannot be addressed. > > I find this comment strange. > > If you mean that I can’t query using a bnode, then sure. > > If you mean that I never get any bnodes back as a result of a Linked > Data URI GET, then I think not. > > Yes, you can get back bnodes. > But the identifier of a bnode has only meaning in the document it is > contained in. > Hence, you cannot ask the server anything else about this bnode, > because you don't have an identifier for it that exists outside of that > one document. > > Therefore, it's maybe better to not get back bnodes at all; > except if the server is sure the client cannot ask further meaningful > questions about them > (for instance, when all triples about a bnode were already in the response, > as is the case with lists, and some other situations as well). > > Best, > > Ruben > -- Paul Houle Expert on Freebase, DBpedia, Hadoop and RDF (607) 539 6254 paul.houle on Skype ontolo...@gmail.com