editoral comments on rdf:text

Take or leave these as you will.

> 1  Introduction

FWIW, the introduction was fairly confusing and hard, unlike the rest of
spec, which is great.  It reads more like an abstract, where I have to
really know the subject to understand it.

My elevator pitch for rdf:text, and what I expected to see in the intro
is: RDF has three types of literals (plain without language tag, plain
with language tag, and typed), and sometimes when you're designing
systems layered on RDF, this gives you three times the
complexity. rdf:text lets you treat RDF as having just typed literals,
so it's sometimes good for simplifying things.

(In retrospect, after all this, Boris, are you having second thoughts
about using rdf:text at all in OWL 2?  :-)

I'd probably link to 
     http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-concepts/#section-Literals
at the first mention of RDF literals.

> All typed RDF literals are interpreted as plain RDF literals,
  
This confused me a lot until I figured it out it meant "All literals
of type rdf:text are interpreted..." or some such.

The last paragraph of the intro should probably be in an
Acknowledgements section instead of the Intro.

I should note that I've always said "RDF plain literal" and "RDF typed
literal", where this document says "plain RDF literal" and "typed RDF
literal".  That struck me as odd, but I got used to it.  Since the RDF
specs just call it "plain literal" and "typed literal", it's not much
help.

> 2 Preliminaries 

The link "Char" is http://www.w3.org/TR/xml11/#NT-Char
I think you now mean http://www.w3.org/TR/xml/#NT-Char

I loved the first example.   (it's odd, but cool.)

> A typed RDF literal consists of a string and a datatype URI [RDF], it
> is written as "abc"^^datatypeURI,

really it's     "abc"^^<datatypeURI>

although since we always qnames in this doc, and lt/gt are often used to
signal metasyntax, maybe that would just be more confusing.

> 3 Definition of the rdf:text Datatype 

I'd kinda like table borders in the example; I always have a hard time
doing them in the wiki, though.

> 4 Relationship with Plain RDF Literals and xs:string

All good (modulo substantive issues raised elsewhere)

> 5 Functions on rdf:text Data Values 

I didn't read section 5 very closely; I should study xpath, xquery and
DTB first.

Let's just use "rtfn" as the namespace abreviation.  No one else seems
to be using that, and people will probably follow our lead.

That's it.  :-)

     -- Sandro

Received on Tuesday, 7 April 2009 01:42:13 UTC