Re: Let's get the Literals out of the RDF Graph

[Sandro Hawke]

> > From Patrick.Stickler
> >
[...]
> >
> > After all, a string *is* a sequence already. That's part of its
definition.
> > No need to make explicit what can be left implicit and reliably obtained
> > as needed. It's all about which is more expensive. I.e., whether you'd
> > be dissecting the literals or concatenating the characters more often.
>
> If we make it explicit, then computers can understand it, which I
> think is the point of the semantic web.  As I understand your
> proposal, every new type of literal to come along would require
> additions to all the deployed semantic web agents for them to
> understand data using the literal.  Not so with mine.  With mine, once
> an agent understands the very concept of Dates and Numbers (via an
> ontology like my String one), they get (for free) to understand all
> formats of dates, floating point numbers, numbers in various bases,
> etc -- because they never see that stuff, since it's not part of the
> graph.
>

I don't see that we have to make knowledge about a string "explicit".  Every
programming system has some notion of "string" already.  What we have to
have is a way to distinguish between properties (objects) that are intended
to be strings (or string representations of types like integers) from URIs.

In other words, give me a way to distinguish the difference between a
property value that really is a URI (i.e., it really is a resource) from a
property value that is a string that happens to look like a URI (i.e., it
really is a literal).  One virtue of using something like the data: scheme
for literal values is precisely that it makes that distinction possible.

Cheers,

Tom P