Re: Proposal for ISSUE-12, string literals

On 5/13/2011 11:00 AM, Richard Cyganiak wrote:
> This feels weird. Ok, "foo" is of type string, even though the type is implicit, I can understand that. But why is it no longer a string if I tag it as English? Shouldn't it still have an implicit type of string? So you have replaced one weird thing (multiple ways of representing a string) with another weird thing (a notion of string datatypes that doesn't make sense).
>
> I think the sensible way would be:
> 1) every literal has *both* a datatype and a (possibly empty) language tag;
> 2) of the built-in datatypes, only xsd:string can have non-empty language tags;
> 3) plain literals and rdf:PlainLiterals don't exist;
> 4) "foo" in concrete syntaxes is syntactic sugar for "foo"^^xsd:string.
> 5) "foo"@en in concrete syntaxes is syntactic sugar for "foo"^^xsd:string@en.

I would love this, if it were workable. I just didn't think that that 
sort of change to the model was feasible to warrant consideration.

Lee

>
> This *might* work better than the rdf:PlainLiteral mess when translated into spec changes, but raises BC issues, and requires changes to syntax specs to add the syntactic sugar, so I prefer the proposal that says implementations MAY unify to plain literals, as it doesn't require changes to the abstract syntax.
>
>> As long as the surface forms "foo" and "foo"^^xsd:string get normalized to the same thing (or systems have permission to do such normalization) then I'm happy.
>
> Good to hear that.
>
> Best,
> Richard
>

Received on Friday, 13 May 2011 15:43:37 UTC