Re: RDF-ISSUE-12 (String Literals): Reconcile various forms of string literals (time permitting) [Cleanup tasks]

On Mar 6, 2011, at 09:12 , Steve Harris wrote:
[snip]
> 
>> (FWIW, offhand, I think this is a better solution than the one in my
>> email of 2 minutes ago.)
>> 
>> (I don't think rdf:PlainLiteral is a problem.  It was designed not to
>> be, and I haven't heard any reports of it turning out to be. It's just a
>> way to express plain literals in systems like RIF and OWL 2 that don't
>> have native plain literals.  It doesn't manifest in systems like RDF and
>> SPARQL that do have native plain literals.)
> 
> I'm not really clear on what rdf:PLainLiteral does, or is for, so I don't really have an opinion.
> 

My own elevator pitch: if I want do to any time of datatype reasoning (in RDFS, OWL, or RIF) with a literal that has language tags, then I need a datatype that has language tags. xsd:string does not have languag tags, and RDF's plain literal is not a datatype. Hence rdf:PlainLiteral that is a datatype for strings with language tags.

> Is it likely to encounter rdf:PlainLiteral in the wild? I don't off-hand know of any RDF parsers that do anything special with it.

The answer is probably not really. But if RIF-like or OWL-like reasoning (and that includes OWL RL in this case, too, ie, a relatively simple OWL reasoning layer) is used on multilingual data, then rdf:PlainLiteral (or something like that) becomes unavoidable.

The more generic fact is: my feeling is that RDF data (or vocabularies) in the wild is still dominated by English data (although I do not have exact measure). That is a separate problem but obviously related to the issue of rdf:PlainLiteral and its occurrence.

Ivan


> 
> - Steve
> 
> -- 
> Steve Harris, CTO, Garlik Limited
> 1-3 Halford Road, Richmond, TW10 6AW, UK
> +44 20 8439 8203  http://www.garlik.com/
> Registered in England and Wales 535 7233 VAT # 849 0517 11
> Registered office: Thames House, Portsmouth Road, Esher, Surrey, KT10 9AD
> 
> 


----
Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead
Home: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/
mobile: +31-641044153
PGP Key: http://www.ivan-herman.net/pgpkey.html
FOAF: http://www.ivan-herman.net/foaf.rdf