Re: Subjects as Literals

I have to add my 2 cents here.

> However, if you see some specific harm in permitting statements about
> > literals, please tell us what that harm would be.
>

The specific harm that I would see is that statements would be made about
literals given some particular context of that literal, rather than in a
global scope.

For example:

"London" rdf:type geo:City
"London" dcterms:isPartOf "England"

That is true only for the particular London which is the capital of England,
not London, Texas, London, Ontario or London in Kiribati.

Now the global graph gets very confused when the subjects are merged, and
this 'London' is in four different countries at once.

The only globally true statements about literals are rather dull:

"London" numberOfCharacters 6
"London" firstCharacter "L"

For the few use cases where it would be interesting to say something that is
globally true about a literal, a URI can easily be assigned. Be that a UUID
or an HTTP URI which returns the literal when dereferenced.


Rob Sanderson
Los Alamos National Laboratory

Received on Wednesday, 30 June 2010 20:55:20 UTC