RE: #rdfms-literals-as-resources in scope?

>Pushing aside resource mumbo jumbo (red herrings).

I disagree; the problem is to get this mumbo jumbo consistent, since 
our remit is to make the M&S spec coherent.

>To me, it
>comes down to these 3 questions:
>
>1: Feasibility: can we give RDF Literals URIs in the M&S and
>stay within the charter?

Yes, but....

>2: Validity: should we give RDF Literals URIs in the M&S?

No, because....

>3: Purpose: if we did give RDF Literals URIs, what are we
>using the RDF to describe? (it's not at all clear to me)

If you use the literal, you are describing a value directly; if you 
were to use the URI of the literal, you would be referring to a 
representation of the value. And there really isn't much utility in 
doing that, as far as I can see. Still, you *could* do it, and you 
would be referring to the same thing if you did so.

But further to 2.; while we should not give literals URI's , they are 
nevertheless resources. Thats all we need to say.

Pat Hayes

PS. Heres how Ive been translating this debate internally, which may 
help get the central issues clear.
resource  <---->  entity (ie anything at all, anything in the 
universe or out of it, anything that can possibly be referred to or 
quantified over; anything that can be conceived of in the mind of 
Man, God or Tim B-L; the most general category possible.)
URI  <------>  name, referring expression
literal  <----->  numeral, a special kind of referring expression 
from which the referent can be computed.
number  <------>  the entities that numerals refer to.

Now, are numbers entities? Yes. Are *numerals* entities? Well, yes. 
Is there any difference between a numeral and a URI? Not much 
difference semantically - they are both referring expressions - but 
quite a lot of difference syntactically. So: literals are resources 
(of course) but literals are not URIs. On the other hand, the value 
denoted by a literal *could* be given a URI, and so could the literal 
itself.

>Bill
>
>---
>Bill de hÓra  :  InterX  :  bdehora@interx.com
>
>
>:-----Original Message-----
>:From: Aaron Swartz [mailto:me@aaronsw.com]
>:Sent: 05 July 2001 23:24
>:To: Brian McBride
>:Cc: Ron Daniel; rdf core
>:Subject: Re: #rdfms-literals-as-resources in scope?
>
>[...]

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Received on Friday, 6 July 2001 15:20:47 UTC