Fwd: Tag-less literals and literals with empty tags

Antoine is not member of the list, hence this forward.

Ivan

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Antoine Isaac <aisaac@few.vu.nl>
> Date: July 18, 2011 22:22:38 GMT+02:00
> To: public-rdf-wg@w3.org
> Cc: Ivan Herman <ivan@w3.org>, Coralie Mercier <coralie@w3.org>, Guus Schreiber <schreiber@cs.vu.nl>
> Subject: Tag-less literals and literals with empty tags
> message-id: <4E24960E.2010705@few.vu.nl>
> 
> [After 3 weeks being blocked by the W3C mail system, I'm re-trying. If you get this mail and answer, please cc public-esw-thes@w3.org, from which this discussion comes]
> 
> Dear RDF group,
> 
> A question which may be related to stuff you're being discussing now on literals.
> 
> On the SKOS community list, a question has been sent to know whether one of the SKOS axioms (S14: "A resource has no more than one value of skos:prefLabel per language tag", http://www.w3.org/TR/skos-reference/#labels) applies to literals without language tags [1].
> 
> The intention behind this axiom is of course that yes: the graph
> S skos:prefLabel "A" ; skos:prefLabel "B" .
> is inconsistent.
> 
> When we wrote the spec, the assumption was that literals without tags could be considered as literal with empty tags, and thus the wording for S14 was catching all situations.
> 
> However it is not so clear from the RDF specs. In particular, some of us made the following points:
> 
> 
>> Alan Ruttenberg wrote:
>> without a language tag it is a string, with a language tag it is a pair of
>> strings. The set of plain literals without language tags is *not* the
>> set of pairs (string , "").
> 
> (which I think matches what is written in the RDF Concepts and Abstract Syntax)
> 
> 
> And:
> 
> 
>> Antoine Isaac  wrote:
>> http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-plain-literal/#plfn:compare
>> 
>> [plfn:compare] returns the empty sequence if one of the arguments is empty,
>> if one of $comparand1 and $comparand2 has a language tag and the other one does not,
>> or if the language parts of $comparand1 and $comparand2 are unequal.
>> 
> 
> 
> But the rdf:PlainLiteral spec also has for plfn:lang-from-literal, which is used in the spec of plfn:compare:
> 
> 
>> Simon Spero wrote:
>> http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-plain-literal/#plfn:lang-from-PlainLiteral
>> 5.1.3 plfn:lang-from-PlainLiteral
>>    Summary: returns the language tag l if $arg is an rdf:PlainLiteral data value
>> of the form < s, l >, and returns the empty string if $arg is an rdf:PlainLiteral
>> data value of the form s.
> 
> 
> Note that the XML spec should solve directly the issue, for any RDF/XML data:
> 
> 
>> Johan De Smedt wrote:
>> From http://www.w3.org/TR/xml/#sec-lang-tag <http://www.w3.org/TR/xml/%23sec-lang-tag>,
>> 
>> “For example:
>> [...]
>> <p xml:lang="en-US">What color is it?</p>
>> <sp who="Faust"  desc='leise' xml:lang="de">
>>    <l>Habe nun, ach! Philosophie,</l>
>>    <l>Juristerei, und Medizin</l>
>> [...]
>> The language specified by |xml:lang| applies to the element where it is specified (including the values of its attributes), and to all elements in its content unless overridden with another instance of |xml:lang|. In particular, the empty value of |xml:lang| is used on an element B to override a specification of |xml:lang| on an enclosing element A, without specifying another language. Within B, it is considered that there is no language information available, just as if |xml:lang| had not been specified on B or any of its ancestors.
>> So I conclude that, without any outer context that pre-establishes a language, the following should be equivalent.
>> <skos:prefLabel>Dog</skos:prefLabel>
>> <skos:prefLabel xml:lang=””>Dog</skos:prefLabel>
> 
> 
> But for other RDF syntaxes, it's maybe not so clear. And I'm not sure it's "so clear" even for the RDF/XML situation: digging this was painful. Whichever of the alternatives is right (a tag-less literal is equivalent to a literal with empty language tag, or not) an extra line in one of the RDF specs would be handy!
> 
> Best,
> 
> Antoine
> 
> [1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-esw-thes/2011Jun/0021.html
> 
> 
> 


----
Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead
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Received on Tuesday, 19 July 2011 07:37:10 UTC