Re: datatypes and MT

>The main point is that the object in
>   :s eg:shoeSize "10".
>is *not* a string object but some-thing that
>can be further characterized....

I entirely agree, that is exactly what the MT extension says.  What a 
literal denotes is not the string itself (unless its a strong 
literal, of course), but something in the semantic domain.

>... as having a
>rdfs:str property with string value "10"

Ah, but that seems to me to be both unnecessary and pernicious. 
Unnecessary since there is no need to say explicitly that the thing 
denoted by a name is denoted by the name; you know that because you 
used the name to denote it, whether the name is literal or not.  This 
is like insisting that instead of saying 'Joe' I have to say 'a 
person whose name is "Joe" ' all the time.  Pernicious, because *any* 
kind of 'uniform' mapping from things to the strings that denote them 
cannot be sustained, because naming is intrinsically many-one.  If we 
must do use bnodes, then we have to use Sergey's trick of using the 
literal mapping name explicitly to attach the literal string to the 
thing it names.

Pat

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Received on Monday, 5 November 2001 20:05:08 UTC