Re: Cutting the Patrician datatype knot

[<Patrick.Stickler@nokia.com>]

> It appears to me to be a requirement for a data typing scheme
> which must preserve the lexical forms. And because RDF does not
> and IMO should not have native internal representations of values,
> a pairing approach seems the most efficient for preserving the
> data typing knowledge until applications can use it in the context
> of their own internalized data typing schemes.
>

Seems to me that there are two parts to this discussion.  I'll try to break
them out for clarity here.

1) Should the RDF processor (and the resulting graph, if that's what gets
built) understand the datatypes of the values, or should it simply capture
the string (and any datatype indicators that come with the value)
representing the value?

If yes, then the processor does not perform validation against the values.
The using application does this (or possibly the xml processor, if XML
Schema datatypes end up being used).

If no, then the RDF processor interprets the values.  But then we get into
the problem of the internal representation of the processor, as Pat . S.
mentioned.  Should the original literal value get reproduced if the graph
were to be re-serialized)?

2)  Should the datatype of a literal value be represented by an RDF
statement or by some other syntax?

Whatever approach gets adopted, it needs to accomodate plain strings with no
assigned datatype.  This is needed to let people build RDF structures by
hand, and to allow the datatype to be omitted if it could not be determined
or were otherwise not needed.

Cheers,

Tom P

Received on Saturday, 1 December 2001 10:35:34 UTC