Re: 2001-09-07#5 Literals (use cases/test inputs, please?)

>Brian McBride wrote:
>>
>>  Dan Connolly wrote:
>>
>>  [...]
>>
>>  >>Doesn't this just represent a deficiency in cwm?
>>  >>
>>  >
>>  > Perhaps, or perhaps it represents a deficiency in
>>  > the design of literals. Why is it we can query
>>  > on any other property of anything using RDF properties,
>>  > but we can't query the language of a label using
>>  > RDF properties?
>>
>>  Yes and there are a few more like that, aren't there:
>>
>>     o Why can't I query the namespace of property using properties?
>
>Actually, we do have a property for that
>use case: rdfs:isDefinedBy.
>It has to be explicitly stated, but that's the only
>thing that makes sense; it doesn't make sense to speak
>of *the* namespace of a property, in part because
>it doesn't make sense to speak of *the* name of
>a property: a property can have lots of names.

Right, and so can anything else.

There is something wierd going on here. We seem to be vanishing into 
a use/mention  black hole. Look: the lang is an attribute *of the 
literal itself* , right? Not of the value of the literal. So if we 
want to state it in triples, what do we use to *refer to* the 
literal? If we use the literal, it refers to whatever its value is, 
which might be all kinds of things, depending on the datatyping 
information available, but in general will not actually be the 
literal itself. So to refer to the actual literal - the syntactic 
object in the triple - we would need a name for the literal. We 
havn't got any names for literals, however. Since literals are not 
themselves the literal values in any literal datatyping scheme (are 
they?), the only way we could refer to a literal would be to give it 
a URI and use that. To do that systematically would require some 
systematic way of assigning URIs to literals (not literal values, but 
literals themselves.) Is there any such way available?

Pat
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Received on Tuesday, 23 October 2001 18:02:13 UTC