Property copying final issues

We're almost done with the conversation on property copying, but I don't think we've quite converged yet.

The current draft of the spec has the following rules:

Rule: pattern-copy
  ?subject rdfa:copy ?target . ?target a rdfa:Pattern; ?predicate ?object
  => 
  ?subject ?predicate ?object .
  except -- ?predicate = rdf:type and ?object = rdfa:Pattern.

Rule: clean-copy:
 ?subject rdfa:copy ?target => remove ?subject rdfa:copy ?target

Rule: clean-pattern:
  ?subject a rdfa:Pattern; ?predicate ?object => remove ?subject ?predicate ?object

There are several problems with this that the original statement had addressed:

* The pattern-copy uses a form of pattern not used in any other specs, whereas the original closely followed the rule language in RDFS.

* The clean-copy rule removes every use of rdfa:copy, not just those which actually reference a defined pattern.

* The clean-pattern rule removes all patterns, even if they're not referenced.

It may be that these rules are easier to understand than the originals, but they mean different things; we should be clear on what we want the semantics to be.

Should we remove every use of rdfa:copy, even if it doesn't reference a pattern? I think this may be a problem if we do.

Should we remove every pattern, even if it is not referenced? This could be a problem, but I could imaging using a "library" of patterns which may or may not be used by a specific document, and not wanting the patterns to survive.

I think we need to finally resolve these issues, and have some final rules in place before we can agree to publish.

Gregg Kellogg
gregg@greggkellogg.net

Received on Tuesday, 29 January 2013 20:38:06 UTC