Notation3: Graph Terms for RDF

Dörthe Arndt, Pierre-Antoine Champin

Notation3 Logic was introduced as an extension of RDF allowing the user to express rules on top of triples and to make statements about graphs. The original proposal of the logic only came with an informal specification of its semantics which has been refined later on. While this refinement clarified the meaning of rules and implicitly quantified variables, it left the meaning of graphs used as terms - so-called graph terms - open. In this paper we aim to close this gap. We discuss in detail, how graph terms are used in Notation3, which formal requirements they need to meet, and provide examples to illustrate the difficulties when defining their semantics. We then introduce an abstract syntax for the logic and define its semantics in two steps: similarly to RDF's simple interpretations, we define interpretations and basic entailment for Notation3 which covers plain RDF triples but also triples containing graph terms. N3-entailment is then an extension of basic entailment which assigns meaning to the different special predicates of the logic like for example the implication symbol. N3-entailment is defined in a way that it can be extended whenever a new predicate is added to the…