Re: Dataypes, literals, syntax

----- Original Message -----
From: "Sampo Syreeni" <decoy@iki.fi>
To: "pat hayes" <phayes@ai.uwf.edu>
Cc: "Peter F. Patel-Schneider" <pfps@research.bell-labs.com>;
<www-rdf-logic@w3.org>
Sent: Thursday, August 01, 2002 5:32 AM
Subject: Re: Dataypes, literals, syntax


>
> On 2002-07-31, pat hayes uttered to Peter F. Patel-Schneider:
>
> >Building datatypes into the syntax of literals seems to incorporate
> >datatyping into RDF much more centrally than the other proposals. It
> >would mean for example that RDF without datatyping would be meaningless:
> >all of RDF would be datatyped.
>
> This is perhaps the right time to reiterate my earlier point. As far as I
> can see, literals already have some typing in place because of the
> language and parsetype fields, now considered an integral part of
> literals. (Cf. http://www.w3.org/2000/03/rdf-tracking/#rdfms-xmllang.) I
> can't see why the parsetype bit couldn't be expanded into a full-fledged
> type URI, without things getting any more complicated than they are now.

It strikes me that it is legitimate to pack langid into literals because the
langid is really a statement about the string/label and not the thing that
it denotes. By the same token, it seems to make some sense to pack a
datatype into a literal as long as it is only saying something about the
string (i.e. "10" is in the lexical space of xsd:integer) but seems odd for
that packed statement to be saying anything about the value denoted by that
string (assuming of course that literals can denote things other than
themselves). Otherwise what's the distinction between statements packed
inside literals, and statements represented in the graph? I guess if rdf
evolves some sort of quoting mechanism, we wouldn't need to pack things
within literals at all (at least not as a way of making statements about the
string).

-Geoff Chappell


> --
> Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:decoy@iki.fi, tel:+358-50-5756111
> student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front
> openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2

Received on Thursday, 1 August 2002 12:23:38 UTC