- From: <Patrick.Stickler@nokia.com>
- Date: Fri, 9 Aug 2002 15:58:15 +0300
- To: <Jan.Grant@bristol.ac.uk>
- Cc: <dave.beckett@bristol.ac.uk>, <w3c-rdfcore-wg@w3.org>, <Graham.Klyne@MIMEsweeper.com>, <jjc@hplb.hpl.hp.com>
> Pat, I mooted this ages ago with a pointer to
> http://ioctl.org/rdf/literals; but...
Well, that's your opinion. I don't see it at all as being mooted,
based on the above document.
None of the following are literals:
the unicode string, "foo". (In future, I'll just write this
unicode("foo").)
the unicode string, "foo" with the language tag, "fr".
(langstring("foo", "fr"))
the date, "the first of September, 2001". (date(2001-09-01))
the number 12. (number(12))
the URI, http://www.w3.org/. (uri(http://www.w3.org/))
They are all TDLs, typed data literals, using my own terminology. They
are
all pairings of datatype and lexical representation. The literals in the
above
complex "entities" are actually
"foo"
"foo" and "fr"
"2001-09-01"
"12"
"http://www.w3.org/"
and none of them have globally unambiguous and fixed meaning. They
are all contextual names. Even if the RDF MT were to say that
they all denote themselves at the RDF level, at the application
level, they will denote different things. This has been proven
time and time again. RDF literals have untidy semantics eventually,
and pushing it outside of RDF is just a cop-out.
And introducing a new graph node type for TDLs is completely
disjunct from the issues relating to the meaning of *real*
literals in RDF.
Now, for the record, I don't disagree with most of what you
present in the above referenced document -- except that it
says next to nothing about actual RDF literals. I'm not
technically opposed to having TDLs as first class node types
in the RDF graph -- though I think that it's way too late
to consider adding them, and should be left to RDF 2.0.
This latest proposal is just distracting the WG from actually
reaching closure on the real datatyping and MT/tidyness issues,
and is not sufficiently warranted by flaws in the previous
DT specification to have the consideration of the WG this
late in the process.
Patrick
Received on Friday, 9 August 2002 08:58:19 UTC