- From: Jonathan Borden <jborden@mediaone.net>
- Date: Thu, 25 Jan 2001 18:05:55 -0500
- To: "Aaron Swartz" <aswartz@upclink.com>, "Dave Beckett" <dave.beckett@bristol.ac.uk>
- Cc: "McBride, Brian" <bwm@hplb.hpl.hp.com>, "RDF Interest" <www-rdf-interest@w3.org>
Dave Beckett wrote:
> >>>Aaron Swartz said:
> >
> > This is what I was afraid of. So there is no definitive way to determine
the
> > namespace of an RDF "term"? Are RDF terms even considered to have
specific
> > namespaces -- or is this just a side-effect of the XMLNS system?
I think the inability to reliably 'round trip' URIs and qnames is a big
problem for RDF. I know that not everyone is in love with fragment ids but
'#' is defined by RFC 2396 and there is no reasonable substitute I can see.
The problem with frag ids and text/xml should go away with XPointer so
perhaps this can be revisited in terms of RDF. That is: do not expect the
world to end its namespaces in '#'.
>
> As I remember, this was the reason that rdfs:isDefinedBy was created,
> so that you could express the relationship between a URI of a concept
> and a URI of the namespace or thing at the namespace it is defined
> in. Note the namespace does not necessarily have to point to a (RDF)
> schema.
In RDDL (http://www.rddl.org/) the nature of something is most often its
namespace, in distinction to its "rdf:type" which is namespace uri '#'
local-name. You will note that RDDL URIs resolve to both a human readable
piece of html as well as a machine readable rddl:resource (actually the html
is the content of the rddl:resource element).
If the namespace URI does point to a RDDL document, it is easy to
include an RDF Schema for the namespace.
-Jonathan
Received on Thursday, 25 January 2001 18:20:15 UTC