Re: Slim RDF

On 21 Feb 2001 14:38:12 -0800, Sergey Melnik wrote:
> Many users of the RDF API were upset about the inability to extract
> namespaces from resources. Human designers like organizing the
> vocabularies they create, and namespaces provide an easy (if not free)
> mechanism of doing that. To exploit this mechanism, the editing tools
> need to support it. 

URIs are all about namespaces !

  http://www.w3.org/RDF/
  urn:ietf:rfc:1630

Those example seem quite structured to me...

And by the way, they *are* the recommended vocabulary of RDF.
I do not see the point of introducing another kind of namespaces...

> Other than that, namespaces could provide a
> straightforward way of dealing with primitive types, as I mentioned
> above.

URIs do to, IMHO (data:)

> Thinking about the literals, it seems to me that there might have been
> two key issues that prevented them from being used as subjects in the
> M&S spec:
> 
> - The M&S syntax would have become even clumsier that it is now

This is a purely syntactical issue;
from the model point of view, it would have been much useful,
and *less* clumsy than making literals an exception
(what about modelling xml:lang, for example)

> - From the modeling perspective, you can create a lot of confusion by
> making statements about literals "John" or "Boston". I think having
> explicit namespaces for literals like "urn:string:John" would prevent
> people from making weird statements like
> "urn:string:John"--livesIn-->"urn:string:Boston" (a string lives in
> another string?)

I think it is not more confusing than a common RDF example :

  http://comany.com/~smith --livesIn--> "Boston"

a homepage living in a string ??

  Pierre-Antoine Champin