- From: Michael Smith <msmith@clarkparsia.com>
- Date: Tue, 01 Jul 2008 12:22:19 -0400
- To: Alan Ruttenberg <alanruttenberg@gmail.com>
- Cc: Boris Motik <boris.motik@comlab.ox.ac.uk>, 'OWL Working Group WG' <public-owl-wg@w3.org>
On Tue, 2008-07-01 at 11:13 -0400, Alan Ruttenberg wrote: > Michael, could you give an example of what your concern was re: > internal representation of literals, and how it might play out? My primary concern was that we were getting close to spec'ing implementation details. I agree with Boris that such details aren't important. My point was that tools might not care about structural changes so we shouldn't assume a particular implementation. However, since you asked, here's a trivial example - if a tool could implement an internal representation based on value space identity instead of lexical identity so that "1.0"^^xsd:decimal and "1"^^xsd:decimal could share the same object / db row / etc. For a large ABox with a large number of data property assertions, an additional requirement to store the lexical value may impose a significant memory burden. On the other hand, not storing the canonical (i.e., value space) identity (so it is computed on the fly, perhaps many times) could make some activities much slower (consider DBMS style indexing of a datatype for more efficient query). That might mean my input data is "02.20"^^xsd:decimal but as a query result "2.2"^^xsd:decimal is returned. I think that in some applications trading that for reduced memory consumption and reasoning runtime is permissible. -- Mike Smith Clark & Parsia
Received on Tuesday, 1 July 2008 16:24:24 UTC