Re: Explicit RDF property for "literal has datatype D"?

2009-07-06 19:46 Jeremy Carroll <jeremy@topquadrant.com>:
> Christoph LANGE wrote:
> > y dc:date x .
> >
> > x a rdfs:Literal ;
> >   rdf:value "2008-01-01";
> >   ex:datatype xsd:date .
>
> This type of design was considered by RDF Core in 2002/2003 and the
> current design was preferred.
> You can always drill down in the archives to find some of the discussion.

Thanks for that pointer!  Indeed I found some interesting discussions on the
mailing list:

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-rdfcore-wg/2001Nov/0011.html
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-rdfcore-wg/2002Dec/0007.html
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-rdfcore-wg/2002Sep/0002.html
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-rdfcore-wg/2002Jan/0472.html
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-rdfcore-wg/2001Nov/0295.html

As I found out, it was discussed for a while to use rdf:type in place of the
ex:datatype above, but then that was found to have undesirable consequences.

But now I know how _I_ will do it.  I will borrow rdf:datatype from RDF/XML
(http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-syntax-grammar/#section-Syntax-datatyped-literals),
which is not a _property_ in the strict sense, but just fine for my purpose.
The purpose of my work is not to change the semantics of RDF, but to embed RDF
with its original semantics into a new XML-based host language in order to
have more expressive annotation facilities than in RDF/XML or XHTML+RDFa.  So
what I need for that is some _syntax_, and as a syntactic reference to the
datatype of a literal, rdf:datatype is perfect.

Cheers,

Christoph

-- 
Christoph Lange, Jacobs Univ. Bremen, http://kwarc.info/clange, Skype duke4701