On the Semantics of Anonymous Identity and Reification

Reification and anonymous resources 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 [18], 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 [12, 10]. In this paper we propose a simple semantics for reification and anonymous resources in F-logic [17] — a frame-based logic language, which is a popular formalism for representing and reasoning about semantic information on the Web [22, 9, 11, 8, 7]. 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, and deduction, and it has been shown to provide an effective inference service for RDF [8, 21].