Re: Forms and principles of the JSOD-LD context

On Nov 2, 2011, at 5:02 AM, "Markus Lanthaler" <markus.lanthaler@gmx.net> wrote:

>> Of course, maybe you meant that we could reuse @datatype in this
>> *different* situation, and thus remove the need for the separate
>> @coerce key?
> 
> That's exactly what I meant.
> 
> 
>> Even if so, I think it'd endanger the understanding of
>> what's going on. In fact, I'd might rather replace @iri here with
>> something like @mapsTo. Just to clarify that it is a mapping we're
>> doing, and not instance data. I think this warrants some discussion.
>> In general, I think reuse of terms can be dangerous where precision
>> and clarity is needed. That's certainly the case in context
>> definitions. When on such a meta level, I'd much rather use specific
>> terms than overload anything. (In the same way, using @type would be
>> even more confusing, since it'd then look like we're describing the
>> property or class -- and hence could be expected to @type them with
>> rdf:Property or owl:Class. I.e. far from our intent!)
> 
> I looked at it more from a programmers perspective (and I think a lot of
> people that will eventually use JSON-LD do). If consider the context as kind
> of a header file where all variable declarations are made, I think it would
> make sense. So you basically say: In the context (that's the "header") I set
> up and declare everything that I'll then use in the main JSON-LD document,
> i.e., I map terms and prefixes to IRIs and set their data type. I think
> programmers won't have any problems in understanding that the context isn't
> about instance data. Even more so if they use external context documents. On
> the other hand, the term coercion is typically used to refer to implicit
> (automatic) type conversions in programming.

Agreed, introducing more keywords will only confuse. Programmers will intuit meaning based on context (no pun intended). Probably the same reasoning goes for using @type instead of @datatype both in literals and to replace @coerce in the term definitions.

Gregg
> --
> Markus Lanthaler
> @markuslanthaler
> 
> 
>

Received on Wednesday, 2 November 2011 14:47:06 UTC