Questions about the new datatyping proposal

re: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2002Aug/0111.html

Thanks for your answering my questions about Untidy literals .. that really
helped me understand the problems :)

.... here are some more:

It seems to me that this new datatyping would move all the (legacy inline
literals) from the lexical space to the value space.  Is that true?

When you say "RDF does not say anything about what an inline literal means",
doesn't that mean that the "datatype mapping" of legacy inline literals is
unknown?

... well I see a problem:

Moving (legacy inline literals) into the value space and leaving their
meaning unspecified (and unidentified by URI) means that automated agents
really have no way to identify and process them in a meaningful way.

... and a potential solution:

Why not make up a new (datatype mapping) that contains the whole lexical
space?  The URI for it (in qname format) would be something like
rdf:DatatypeUnknown .  This would be the URI that new datatying compliant
parsers would present to an application when they encounter a inline literal
with no datatyping.  That way the *all*  the nodes that an application
builds in value space for literals, both inline and typed,  would
legitimately reside in value space.  A application would have a standard URI
to identify the legacy ones; and so it could do a good job of processing
them.

... just a thought

Seth Russell
http://robustai.net/sailor/

Received on Thursday, 5 September 2002 14:15:04 UTC