- From: Geoff Chappell <geoff@sover.net>
- Date: Thu, 1 Jul 2010 07:50:19 -0400
- To: "'Pat Hayes'" <phayes@ihmc.us>, "'Axel Rauschmayer'" <axel@rauschma.de>
- Cc: "'David Booth'" <david@dbooth.org>, <nathan@webr3.org>, "'Toby Inkster'" <tai@g5n.co.uk>, "'Dan Brickley'" <danbri@danbri.org>, "'Linked Data community'" <public-lod@w3.org>, "'Semantic Web'" <semantic-web@w3.org>
-----Original Message----- From: semantic-web-request@w3.org [mailto:semantic-web-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Pat Hayes Sent: Thursday, July 01, 2010 12:47 AM To: Axel Rauschmayer Cc: David Booth; nathan@webr3.org; Toby Inkster; Dan Brickley; Linked Data community; Semantic Web Subject: Re: Subjects as Literals, [was Re: The Ordered List Ontology] On Jun 30, 2010, at 3:12 PM, Axel Rauschmayer wrote: >> Intuitively, I would expect each subject literal to have a unique >> identity. For example, I would want to annotate a particular >> instance of "abc" and not all literals "abc". Wouldn't the latter >> treatment make literals-as-subjects less appealing? > >Hmm. Im not sure what this means. Each literal has its own identity, >in a sense, but what the literal refers to is the same in each case: >every occurrence of "23"^^xsd:number must refer to twenty-three. And >since this (the number, not the literal) is what the literal refers >to, and so what the RDF which uses the literal is talking about, why >does it matter which literal you use to refer to it with? > >Maybe what you really need to do is to reify the literal and then talk >about that. Then your notion of this literal vs. that literal does >make sense, but it bears on the semantics of reification in RDF (or >whatever finally takes its place in some future incarnation.) Just wondering if there is an assumption in the can-subjects-be-literals debate that the tidy vs. untidy literal question will be revisited? I guess it's far less of an issue with datatyped literals, but plain literals as subjects seem to be at best not that useful and at worst encourage usage that would just be wrong - e.g: "Obama" ex:presidentOf ex:USA where the plain literal "Obama" is used to refer to the person, rather than the string of characters that it actually refers to. To "fix" rdf to allow that would seem to be a far greater change than just allowing literals as subjects. -Geoff
Received on Thursday, 1 July 2010 11:51:11 UTC