W3C RDF Validation feedback: "colliding" membership properties

Dear Receiver,

The "Submit problem report" button in W3C RDF Validator page 
(http://www.w3.org/RDF/Validator/ARPServlet) does not seem to work (or 
then it just does not give feedback of working...), so I'm using my 
regular email client.

Anyway, parsing...

<rdf:RDF xmlns:n0="http://example.org/packages/vocab#" 
xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"><rdf:Description 
rdf:about="http://example.org/packages/X11"><n0:DistributionSite 
rdf:nodeID="GukCeVwQ2"/></rdf:Description><rdf:Description 
rdf:nodeID="GukCeVwQ2"><rdf:li 
rdf:resource="ftp://ftp1.example.org"/><rdf:_1 
rdf:resource="ftp://ftp.example.org"/><rdf:type 
rdf:resource="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#Alt"/><rdf:li 
rdf:resource="ftp://ftp2.example.org"/></rdf:Description></rdf:RDF>

gives triples...

Number	Subject	Predicate	Object
1 	http://example.org/packages/X11 
http://example.org/packages/vocab#DistributionSite 	genid:UGukCeVwQ2
2 	genid:UGukCeVwQ2 	http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#_1 
ftp://ftp1.example.org
3 	genid:UGukCeVwQ2 	http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#_1 
ftp://ftp.example.org
4 	genid:UGukCeVwQ2 	http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#type 
http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#Alt
5 	genid:UGukCeVwQ2 	http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#_2 
ftp://ftp2.example.org

i.e. where the rdf:_1 membership property appears twice. I suspect this 
(Triples output) might be considered as an error.

The informative rdf:Alt definition in the spec says that rdf:_1 is 
intended to be considered as the default or preferred value (see, e.g., 
the RDF Primer and RDF/XML syntax spec). In this case, the parse result 
invalidates this default (unique rdf:_1) information, even if no actual 
entailment is required.

A possible correction would be to check whether rdf:_1 is explicitly 
defined in the model, and if so, start enumerating rdf:li's from 2 (seed 
value of the "li-counter"). Another (a better?) correction would be 
giving triples with a single rdf:_1, encoding others as rdf:li, i.e. not 
aiming to translate li's into numbers in the first place. However, the 
latter might be considered a violation against RDF Semantics since 
rdf:li is not recognised in the RDF Container Vocabulary (which is a bit 
weird, btw.).

Of course, this might land somewhere in the grey area for RDF (and I do 
get similar parse output from, e.g., using RDFLib 3.0.0). To my 
understanding, however, RDF specs to not forbid mixing rdf:li and rdf:_1 
properties in serialisations, which raises this issue. Since the W3C 
validator might be considered "normative", I simply thought reporting 
this might make sense. (The specs do not seem to define this.)

If I am mistaken, I would not mind getting a brief note in email, thanks.

Best regards,

--Ossi


-- 
Ossi Nykänen, Adjunct Professor, Dr.Tech.  Tel   +358 40 849 0730
Tampere University of Technology           Fax   +358 3 3115 3549
Institute of Mathematics, HLab
http://matriisi.ee.tut.fi/hypermedia/en/   ossi.nykanen@tut.fi
P.O. Box 553, FIN-33101 Tampere, Finland
W3C Finnish Office,  http://www.w3c.tut.fi  ossi@w3.org
-- 
ossi.nykanen@iki.fi, http://www.iki.fi/ossi.nykanen/

Received on Tuesday, 8 February 2011 14:46:33 UTC