support for ill-typed literal terms should remain a requirement

good evening;

with respect to the discussion of the recommendation's requirement for support of ill-typed terms [1], please record a change to my sentiment.
when i discussed the vote with thomas after the call, he corrected my understanding of the purpose of a "straw pole", in that the customary effect is to record an effectively final decision.
i had misunderstood it to be just a milestone along the path of still ongoing deliberations.
in the situation where the outcome constitutes a working group decision, my vote should be recorded as "-1".

the consequence for both interoperability and utility is sufficiently significant that support should be retained as a conformance requirement.
if a change is to be made to recommendations, it should be to characterize the nature of "support".
the essential requirement should be that all terms - even ill-typed terms, are "first class".
by analogy to the source of that concept, this means that it should be possible to incorporate them into graphs, to manipulate them through graph store protocol operations, and to rely on their identity for matching and binding in basic graph patterns and for algebra operations .

this does not mean that all sparql operators must succeed if applied to such terms.
it could even be that the results of such operations is specified to be undefined.
it just means that a graph store must be transparent with respect to them and be able to pass them through intact as opaque terms.

not to do this will compromise severely the ability of rdf to represent and exchange information and diminish its standing as a medium for data integration.

best regards, from berlin,
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[1]   Drop the requirement to support ill-typed literals with recognized datatype IRIs <https://www.w3.org/2024/10/31-rdf-star-minutes.html#783b>
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james anderson | james@dydra.com | https://dydra.com

Received on Thursday, 31 October 2024 22:21:59 UTC