Re: comments on rdf:text draft

Phillips, Addison wrote:
>> Thanks for this comment. I'm afraid, however, that in response to
>> Sandro's
>> comments, I have rewritten earlier today this part of the
>> introduction. I've
>> adopted the "elevator pitch" that Sandro suggested. Please let me
>> know should
>> you consider that the current intro needs further revision.
>>
> 
> The new text is okay, although I think it might leave the average reader slightly mystifying what rdf:text is for. There is a lot of text about different literal flavors, but no mention about why the presence or absence of a language tag is interesting. And it concludes with this paragraph, which suggests some confusion about how to represent text in RDF:
> 
> --
> RDF tools may use other mechanisms for representing internationalized text, such as the xml:lang feature of the rdf:XMLLiteral datatype. The rdf:text datatype does not provide a replacement for such mechanisms.
> --
> 
> It seems to me that the introduction should say why these three classes of literals are related and why rdf:text might be interesting. I would at least include some sort of notation about why language tags might be needed. Perhaps add a third bullet point:
> 
> --
> * Literals often contain human-readable natural language text. RDF needs a mechanism for representing literals in various different languages, for selecting the proper literal in a specific language, and to allow applications to keep language information with literals to facilitate processing that is language affected.

That phrasing implies that RDF lacks such a facility. It does not. 
Language-tagged-plain literals along with the existing SPARQL operators 
for extracting and matching language tags already provide mechanisms 
meeting all of those requirements.

The primary thing that rdf:text adds is a way to refer to such text 
literals for the purposes of OWL2. The original introductory text 
captured that as does the second bullet point in the new text.

Dave

Received on Wednesday, 8 April 2009 07:16:04 UTC