Re: ISSUE-12: xs:string VS plain literals: proposed resolution

On 5/4/2011 12:56 PM, Pat Hayes wrote:
>
> On May 4, 2011, at 10:52 AM, Lee Feigenbaum wrote:
>
>> On 5/4/2011 11:00 AM, Antoine Zimmermann wrote:
>>>> Recommending that stores canonicalize to "foo" would be one way to
>>>> accomplish this, but only for new data. (And even then, is only a
>>>> recommendation.) If we changed (or made a SHOULD-style change) literal
>>>> equality, then the above query would match against :s :p
>>>> "foo"^^xsd:string as well as :s :p "foo", which -- for me -- is the goal
>>>> of this issue.
>>>
>>> This should not affect literal equality, which is really about things
>>> written equal, not about semantic equivalence. "foo"^^xs:string and
>>> "foo" are the same (same interpretation) under XSD entailment, but are
>>> not equal in terms of literal equality (they don't have the same datatype).
>>
>> Right, I understand this.
>>
>> I was asking (/ hoping) that the suggestion was to change this (i.e., suggest a re-defined notion of literal syntactic equality here).
>
> Can you elaborate on what you mean? It seems kind of obvious that
>
> "foo"^^xsd:string
>
> and
>
> "foo"
>
> are not the same literal. (Just look at them: they are not the same.)

Right.

> Are you wanting to replace these by something else, something more abstract, that these are alternative surface forms for? If so, what would the type of this new thing be? What would its syntax be like?

I don't really have a strong feeling on the mechanics. I just thought if 
the goal was to significantly ease the pain of having these two 
similar-but-not-the-same things, that we ought to do more than just 
publish advice which does nothing/very little for existing data.

I was just wondering aloud if there was a way to tweak definitions to 
mandate/strongly suggest that "foo" and "foo"^^xsd:string be the same 
node in the RDF graph. Since that's basically the goal overall, right? 
That the two end up indistinguishable?

I understand from Antoine's response that maybe this isn't the goal, and 
the goal is just to discourage additional proliferation of xsd:string 
typed literals. I don't have any real inherent objection to that, but I 
don't think it's that valuable and might not be worth our time as a 
working group.

Lee

>
> Pat
>
>
>
>> I'm less keen on the whole resolution of the issue if this is only a suggestion to data publishers to not use xsd:string typed literals. I think that's fine, but I don't think it accomplishes much at all (and therefore may not be worth the investment in making the recommendation in the first place).
>>
>> Lee
>>
>>
>
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Received on Wednesday, 4 May 2011 17:03:45 UTC