RE: incomplete datatyping (was: Re: datatypes and MT)

>......
>This serves to underline my assertion that local data types
>are really manditory if you wish to reliably interpret literals,
>and that range definitions don't provide enough information
>to reliably interpret literals, only to test whether they
>conform to such constraints,

?What is the difference? If you can infer that the literal conforms 
to the constraint, then you can apply the constraint, and vice versa. 
The only question to be asked is: is there enough information 
available to correctly interpret the literal?

>and that only can happen when
>types are defined locally.

Why?

>Thus, again, rdfs:range is only prescriptive, not descriptive,
>which really, as I understand it, should bear out from the
>fact that the RDFS spec defines it as a constraint, and even
>though there may be the suggestion that it might serve as a descriptive
>mechanism for "reasoning applications" for inferring the data type
>of non-locally typed literals, that doesn't seem to fit with
>its explicitly stated purpose as a constraint (i.e. a prescriptive
>mechanism) and I think its apparent that this suggestion was
>not intended to be a normative specification of its use as such.

Am I the only person who has no idea what this 
normative/descriptive/prescriptive contrast means? As far as I am 
aware, RDF is *entirely* descriptive.

If this contrast is meaningful, we need to incorporate it into the MT 
somehow, so I wish someone would explain to me (as to a child) what 
it is supposed to mean.

Pat

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Received on Thursday, 8 November 2001 18:51:14 UTC