Re: Comments on this afternoon session on Turtle (ISSUE-12)

(Tagging this as ISSUE-12)

On 14 Apr 2011, at 14:50, Antoine Zimmermann wrote:
> I don't want xs:string to be marked as archaic because if it is, then it means that I am not welcome to write something like:
> 
> :passportNumber  rdfs:range  xs:string .

Personally I don't mind xsd:string being used in range declarations to indicate that the value has to be a plain literal without language tag.

The problem with xsd:string typed literals is that for authors, the choice between "foo" and "foo"^^xsd:string is arbitrary, but those who want to query the data or access it in an API need to know what choice the author made. This is a constant source of usability issues. Hence the desire to normalize both forms internally.

By the way, in range declarations we might even get some use out of the otherwise horrendous rdf:PlainLiteral:

  :title rdfs:range rdf:PlainLiteral .

This could indicate that the values are plain literals with or without language tag.

> Still, I am in favour of simplifying things, so instead of doing nothing, I would rather have plain literals without language tag removed altogether and replaced by typed literals of type xs:string.

I think it's important that the canonical form is "foo" rather than "foo"^^xsd:string because writing the latter is awkward in all syntaxes.

Best,
Richard

Received on Saturday, 16 April 2011 15:27:08 UTC