Re: ISSUE-12 On languages and datatypes

On 06/09/2011 10:37 AM, Antoine Zimmermann wrote:
> This has been already discussed and it's very problematic. The
> conclusion was clearly "we won't do this". From the RDF spec
> perspective, the lang tag is an opaque string which syntactically
> follows RFC 5646. So no relation can be inferred (in RDF) between "en"
> and "en-GB" (that's probably the best we can do). Notice though that a
> multilingual system may apply further processing on language tags but it
> is not RDF business.
>
> In more details:
>
> Le 09/06/2011 09:06, Jan Wielemaker a �crit :
>> On 06/09/2011 12:25 AM, William Waites wrote:
>>> rdflang:en rdfs:subClassOf xsd:string;
>>> rdfs:label "en".
>
> this leads to the conclusion that strings with "en" tags are not
> distinguishable from plain sequences of characters;

In itself, that is not new.  The same applies to rdfs:subClassOf
:dog, :mammal.

There is a problem if the RFC5646 rules cannot be expressed in simple 
subClassOf relations.  I don't know the details here.  I think it should
work 99%, but it is likely that there are corner cases.

Note that without adding the rdfs class hierarchy between the various
you can perfectly well distinguish @en from a plain xsd:string.  I 
certainly would not advocate for the RDF working group to define the
relations between the various language tags.  I sympathise with 
William's proposal to replace the two-dimensional literal space with a 
single, always present, classifier.

Mapping @<lang> to rdflang:<lang> does (IMHO) make handling (un)typed
and language classified literals a lot more more straightforward.

 --- Jan


>
>>>
>>> rdflang:en-GB rdfs:subClassOf rdflang:en;
>>> rdfs:label "en-GB".
>
> and this leads to the conclusion that strings with "en" tags are not
> distinguishable from strings with "en-GB" tags.
>
>>
>> +1
>>
>
> -1

Received on Thursday, 9 June 2011 09:02:02 UTC