Re: renaming rdf:text to rdf:plainLiteral and other issues with the proposal

From: Michael Schneider <schneid@fzi.de>
Subject: RE: (poll) renaming rdf:text to rdf:plainLiteral
Date: Sat, 23 May 2009 06:54:07 -0500

>>-----Original Message-----
>>From: public-owl-wg-request@w3.org [mailto:public-owl-wg-request@w3.org]
>>On Behalf Of Sandro Hawke
>>Sent: Saturday, May 23, 2009 5:33 AM
>>To: public-rif-wg@w3.org; public-owl-wg@w3.org
>>Subject: (poll) renaming rdf:text to rdf:plainLiteral
>>
>>
>>It seems like most of the furor over rdf:text has been caused by some
>>misunderstandings about its intended role.  One of the proposals to help
>>clarify its role has been to rename it from rdf:text to
>>rdf:plainLiteral.  The idea behind this name is to help underscore that
>>it is exactly equivalent (mapping 1-1) to "RDF Plain Literals" [1].  
> 
> Ok, and not too much stressing of the "internationalized" aspect anymore,
> since this seemed to be one major point by some people, IIRC.
> 
> I have no issues with the RDF namespace (otherwise I would have raised 
> them before). However, I would like to see the thing be called 
> 
>   "rdf:PlainLiteral"
> 
> with a capital "P". I believe, for RDF people, the message will then be 
> clearer that this is the distinguished sub /class/ of rdfs:Literal that 
> exactly captures all the plain literals (wasn't Pat Hayes talking about
> a specific class?). Perhaps, this will make it more likely to be 
> supported by a future RDF WG to make it a real built-in of RDF(S), which
> would be a win, especially since we are "re-using" the rdf: namespace. 
> Also, there is rdf:XMLLiteral, instead of rdf:xmlLiteral, so this naming 
> scheme has some precedence in RDF.
> 
> Best,
> Michael

I have no trouble with this proposed name (or with just about any name
in the RDF or OWL namespaces).  I don't think that it is a significant
improvement, however.  A better improvement would be to just relabel the
datatype from being for "Internationalized Strings" to being for
"strings with language tags".

However, and this is a very big caveat, I really don't want the design
of RDF changed in response to this new datatype, as has been proposed.
If having the datatype in the rdf namespace requires a design change,
then I think that it would be much better to just have an OWL datatype
for this purpose.

I'm even becoming very worried about the requirement to avoid literals
with this datatype in RDF graphs.  So far, I'm willing to go along with
this, but the continued changes to this aspect of the proposal are
troubling to me.  In particular, the rationale for the prohibition is
completely bogus.

peter

Received on Saturday, 23 May 2009 14:05:19 UTC