Micheal Schneider's Comments on Last-Call Working Draft of RDF 1.1 Concepts and Abstract Syntax

To my reading these are all editorial, either stylistic decisions or spec bugs, so they could be done (a) without another last call and (b) either now or during CR.

Btw for people who don't know, Micheal was the editor of OWL 2 RDF-Based Semantics (the replacement for OWL Full).

Personally, I think some of these comments are too pedantic.   I like the use of "entity", and I think of noon as a single entity even if it corresponds to an infinite set of points in time.   But that's at the +0 or -0 level.

Hopefully his review of semantics won't find any problems bigger than these, and we can figure out how to handle then by email before Wednesdays meeting.   I guess that mostly depends how available Peter is before/after his flight to Australia.

   - Sandro


-------- Original Message --------
From: Michael Schneider <schneid@fzi.de>
Sent: Sat Oct 19 17:46:12 EDT 2013
To: public-rdf-comments@w3.org
Subject: Comments on Last-Call Working Draft of RDF 1.1 Concepts and Abstract  Syntax

Dear Working Group!

This is my review of the Last-Call Working Draft of the "RDF 1.1 
Concepts and Abstract Syntax" specification.

Unfortunately, I only learnt about the existence of the LCWDs from their 
announcement on the SWIG mailing list as of 3 October, with an - already 
extended - deadline set to 17 October, which was a very short time and 
did not give me enough time to complete the review in time. I hope that 
you will still accept my review. I will send another review for the RDF 
Semantics specification, which I will hopefully finish till tomorrow. To 
ease the process for you, I have, after a mail exchange with Sandro 
Hawke, created my review based on the most-current editor drafts of the 
two documents:

* <https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/rdf/raw-file/default/rdf-concepts/index.html>
* <https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/rdf/raw-file/default/rdf-mt/index.html>

I'd like to add that I have a high personal and professional stake in 
these two documents.

In general, I consider the "Concepts" document pleasing and don't have 
any real show-stopping issues to report. Still, there are a few issues 
that I consider "major", and a couple that I consider "minor".

Major issues:
-------------

* § 3.3: "a datatype IRI, being an IRI that determines how the lexical 
form maps to a literal value." I do not think that it is correct to 
state that an IRIs would determine how the lexical-to-value mapping 
works. IRIs generally do only denote some resource, in this case a 
datatype. It's the datatype specification which determines the mapping, 
not the IRI that denotes the datatype.

* § 3.1: I believe that the "NOTE" about IRIs, literals and blank nodes 
being distinct should be formally specified in some way, and not just 
"noted".

* § 5.1: Several of the XML datatypes listed seem to be incompatible 
with the definition of a "lexical-to-value mapping" in the beginning of 
§5. According to the definition, "each member of the lexical space is 
paired with exactly one value, and is a lexical representation of that 
value. However, for example the lexical forms of the datatype "xsd:time" 
do not uniquely denote a single time value, but denote an infinite 
number of recurrent time values, one per day (for a fixed time zone). 
Further, for the datatype "xsd:date", it is not clear whether a lexical 
form denotes a single point on the timeline (e.g. the starting point of 
a day), or rather a whole interval of values (the whole day). Variants 
of these problems exist for several of the other listed time-related 
datatypes.

Minor issues:
-------------

* § 1.2, par 1, states that the term "resource" "is synonymous with 
entity". I did not find the term "entity" being mentioned elsewhere in 
the document, nor would I say from my experience that it is widely used 
in the RDF world as a synonym for "resource". So I suggest to remove the 
cited phrase.

* § 1.3, 2nd item: double word: "what what"

* § 3.2, the NOTE: "... that permits a much wider range...": the word 
"much" is redundant and should in my opinion not appear in a specification.

* §4.1: In the introductory sentence, the two datasets D1 and D2 each 
have only a single named graph NG1 and NG2, respectively. This would be 
unnessesarily restrictive. Therefore, and from condition 6 of the 
definition, I guess that NG1 and NG2 are really meant to be /sets/ of 
named graphs for the two datatsets?

* §4.1: Typos in condition 4 of the definition:
   - comma missing in the set defining G
   - the set defining G runs to "1n", which should be "tn" or "Tn"
   - the set defining M(G) runs to "M(T(n))": be careful to use the same
     term ("tn" or "Tn" that is used in the set defining G.

* §5.4: "Semantic conditions of RDF MAY recognize other datatype 
IRIs...". The term "semantic condition" is specific to the RDF Semantics
   and as far as I can see does not appear elsewhere in the Concepts 
document. I think that the sentence should appear only in the RDF 
Semantics and should be removed in the Concepts document.

Best regards,
Michael Schneider




-- 
Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.