Re: rdfms-xmllang alternatives

At 10:28 PM 7/16/01 +0100, Brian McBride wrote:
>I took an action at the last teleconference to write up
>alternative ways of resolving this issue.
>
>Option 1: No Change
>===================
>
>xml:lang attributes are considered to be 'part of' a literal.
>
>This is an issue that has caused some confusion amongst developers
>so we would need to write up a clarification of the specifications
>to explain more clearly what is going on.
>
>We would also need to modify n-triple to be able to represent the
>languague component of a literal.
>
>Advantages:
>
>This is the simplest resolution.  It makes significant change to
>M&S and existing RDF processors which implemented the spec will
>be unaffected.  It requires only one triple to represent a
>property with a literal value.
>
>Disadvantages:
>
>Does not represent language as a triple so requires special
>purpose processing to support, for example query.

Another possible disadvantage?:  not all literals are in some language.  It 
doesn't really make sense to specify a language for, say, a decimal number 
or a MIME type string.  Thus, we have some literals whose interpretation is 
dependent on an associated language attribute, and others whose 
interpretation may depend on other factors.

#g


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Graham Klyne                    Baltimore Technologies
Strategic Research              Content Security Group
<Graham.Klyne@Baltimore.com>    <http://www.mimesweeper.com>
                                 <http://www.baltimore.com>
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Received on Tuesday, 17 July 2001 13:08:36 UTC