- From: Pat Hayes <phayes@ai.uwf.edu>
- Date: Fri, 1 Mar 2002 12:48:18 -0600
- To: Graham Klyne <Graham.Klyne@MIMEsweeper.com>
- Cc: w3c-rdfcore-wg@w3.org
>Pat, I don't think it's anything like that bad. > >It is also possible for a literal/string to have *no* language, >which is what I'd expect for (say) numbers. (Though there was a >suggestion from outside that no-language matches any language, which >I'd oppose to avoid the kind of confusion you raise.) Right, though I can see why they wanted that. What we really need here is a distinction between no-language-specified (ie missing tag) which matches anything, and an actual or implied not-language tag meaning 'not in any human language', which doesn't match anything except the same datatype. Which in turn suggests that a datatype should be thought of as a kind of formal language. You can write English in -en and you can write numerals in -xsd:number, right? In fact, it seems to me that datatypes and language tags are almost logically indistinguishable. They both impose lexical rules on strings, and impose some extra-RDF conditions on their interpretation. That actually would make more sense than saying that they weren't in any language (If they aren't in *any* language, how can you encode them in strings?) Pat -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- IHMC (850)434 8903 home 40 South Alcaniz St. (850)202 4416 office Pensacola, FL 32501 (850)202 4440 fax phayes@ai.uwf.edu http://www.coginst.uwf.edu/~phayes
Received on Friday, 1 March 2002 13:48:16 UTC