Re: Comments on this afternoon session on Turtle

On 2011-04-14, at 13:54, Eric Prud'hommeaux wrote:

> * Lee Feigenbaum <lee@thefigtrees.net> [2011-04-14 07:25-0400]
>> On 4/14/2011 3:47 AM, Antoine Zimmermann wrote:
>>> Just a comment and what my votes would have been if I could have joined
>>> the session.
>>> 
>>> ========
>>> PROPOSED: Mark xs:string as archaic for use in RDF, recommending use of
>>> plain literals instead. Recommend that systems silently convert
>>> xs:string data to plain literals.
>>> 
>>> -1
>>> 
>>> I always thought of plain literals as a written utterance in an
>>> unspecified language. This is not what xs:strings are. Strings are a
>>> sequence of characters, irrespective of any language. They cannot be
>>> translated or assigned a language tag. xs:string should be used for
>>> things like serial numbers, identifiers, passwords, etc.
>>> 
>>> I would rather have plain literals with no language tags implicitly
>>> meaning xs:string (as Jean-François proposed but it seemed unnoticed).
>>> xs:string is not defined by RDF anyway, I don't know why RDF should
>>> reject this particular XML datatype.
>>> 
>>> If plain literals with no lang tag are implicitly typed with xs:string,
>>> then all literals have either a datatype or a language tag, which
>>> simplifies the manipulation of literals.
>> 
>> I agree with this point of view.
> 
> Are there use cases which motivate having a special datatype to
> indicate that there's no possibility of a langtag? I recognize that
> this datatype comes for free from XSD, but we have an opportunity to
> encourage simplification.

There's a ISO 639 code "zxx", for non linguistic content.

e.g. [] :hex "32fea45ab982346"@zxx .

- Steve

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Received on Thursday, 14 April 2011 13:11:21 UTC