RDF-ISSUE-71 (String Literals 2): Reconcile various forms of string literals (time permitting) [Cleanup tasks]

RDF-ISSUE-71 (String Literals 2): Reconcile various forms of string literals (time permitting) [Cleanup tasks]

http://www.w3.org/2011/rdf-wg/track/issues/71

Raised by: Richard Cyganiak
On product: Cleanup tasks

At the moment we have two different ways of expressing a simple string:

- xsd:string
- rdf:PlainLiteral

and two different ways of expressing a string with language tag:

- lanuage-tagged literal
- rdf:PlainLiteral

They are very very close to one another but they are officially different.

There is no way to say that the range of a property is “any language-tagged string” without going all the way to OWL.

The only way to say that the range of a property is “any string, language-tagged or not” is by using rdf:PlainLiteral.

rdf:PlainLiteral is nowhere referenced in the core RDF specs. It uses a name (plain literal) that seems a bit inappropriate in light of the ISSUE-12 decision. And it is really weird because it defines lexical forms, and then forbids their use.

In SPARQL, DATATYPE("foo") and DATATYPE("foo"^^xsd:string) is xsd:string, but DATATYE("foo"@en) is an error.

All of these things are quite odd. Can we reduce or fix some of them?

Received on Thursday, 21 July 2011 18:19:09 UTC