Re: Further changes to rdf:text + a proposal for a change

Boris Motik wrote:

> There is, however, a much nicer solution to the latter problem. We could change
> the value space of rdf:text such that it contains two types of objects:
> 
> - all strings, and
> - all pairs of the form ( s, l ) where l is a (nonempty) language tag.
> 
> In this case, rdf:text would *be* interpreted as the set of all plain RDF
> literals. That is, we would not need to fuss about with changing the
> interpretation of xsd:string: the very definition of the value space of rdf:text
> would contain the value space of xsd:string, as well as all plain RDF literals.
> Thus, we could just simply note this in the document and would not need any
> additional definitions. Furthermore, the XQuery functions that work on
> xsd:string would be readily applicable to the subset of rdf:text that does not
> represent strings with language tags.
> 
> The nice aspect of this solution is that rdf:text then just provides an explicit
> name for the set of all plain RDF literals, so we can't really be accused of
> changing anything.
> 
> The only downside is that the definitions of facets and some functions would
> become slightly messier, as they cannot treat literals with and without language
> tags uniformly any more. I think, however, that this is a small price to pay for
> the elegance that this solution brings.
> 
> Please let me know how you feel about this. If everyone agrees, I would like to
> make the change as soon as possible (preferably today) so that the document can
> be reviewed soon.

This is indeed a much nicer solution and should address the comments we 
raised concerning the reinterpretation of xsd:string.

Dave
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