Reasoning about Anonymous Resources and Meta Statements on the Semantic Web

Anonymous resources and meta statements are two of the more interesting features of RDF — an emerging standard for representing semantic information on the Web. Ironically, when RDF was standardized by W3C over three years ago [24], it came without a semantics. There is now growing understanding that a Semantic Web language without a semantics is an oxymoron, and a number of efforts are directed towards giving RDF a precise semantics [17,15,11]. In this paper we propose a simple semantics for anonymous resources and meta statements in F-logic [23] — a frame-based logic language, which is a popular formalism for representing and reasoning about semantic information on the Web [29,14,16,13,12]. The choice of F-logic (over RDF) as a basis for our semantics is motivated by the fact that F-logic provides a comprehensive solution for the problem of integrating frames, rules, inheritance, and deduction, and it has been shown to provide an effective inference service for RDF [13,28].