Jeni's Musings

I think the only way you’ll begin to resolve this is to scope every triple to a date range when it is valid. The “current” URI could be a resource referencing all the triples known to be valid for the resource, now; other date-specific resources could be introduced to represent the state of the resource at other points in time.

I think these “container” resources would have to be computed at the point of query, rather than pre-computed: it would be computationally expensive to continually group statements within larger resources and keep the relationships up to date as time passes. Or perhaps you’d leave the client to do that, and provide an extremely minimal, “permanent” resource which points to types of relationships which it holds to other “permanent” resources. Though this whole idea of what constitutes the permanent core of a resource is always going to be sticky itself (for example, will schools always have names?).

There are some interesting thoughts on this in the computational linguistics literature (I recall this one - http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P/P88/P88-1009.pdf - was pretty interesting); and there are going to be interesting cases where you can’t be definite about dates/times when triples could/would/should etc. hold. So, a thorny issue which definitely needs addressing.