Language-tagged strings

Dear WG,


The current Editor's draft of RDF Concept (as of 5th June 2012 [1]) 
defines a language-tagged string as literal [2]. By the definition of 
literal above, this means that a language-tagged string consists of:
  - a lexical form being a UNICODE string;
  - a datatype IRI.

But it immediately contradicts this by saying that, in addition to 
lexical form and datatype IRI, it also has a non-empty language tag.

Literal equality indicates that the definition of literals should rather be:

A literal in an RDF graph consists of:
  - a lexical form,
  - a datatype IRI,
  - and an optional language tag.

It would also be possible to simply include the language tag inside the 
lexical form like this:

A literal in an RDF graph consists of:
  - a lexical form being a UNICODE string or a pair 
<UNICODE-string,BCP47-tag>,
  - a datatype IRI.

where only the literals with type rdf:langString can have a language 
tag. Then equality would be defined like this:

Literal equality: Two literals are equal if and only if the two lexical 
forms (including possibly the language tag) and the two datatype IRIs 
compare equal, character by character.


[1] RDF 1.1 Concepts and Abstract Syntax - W3C Editor's Draft 05 June 
2012. http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/rdf/raw-file/default/rdf-concepts/index.html
[2] 3.3 Literals, in [1]. 
http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/rdf/raw-file/default/rdf-concepts/index.html#section-Graph-Literal
-- 
Antoine Zimmermann
ISCOD / LSTI - Institut Henri Fayol
École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Saint-Étienne
158 cours Fauriel
42023 Saint-Étienne Cedex 2
France
Tél:+33(0)4 77 42 66 03
Fax:+33(0)4 77 42 66 66
http://zimmer.aprilfoolsreview.com/

Received on Friday, 10 August 2012 16:09:21 UTC