Re: Proposal for ISSUE-12, string literals

Le 13/05/2011 17:00, Richard Cyganiak a écrit :
> On 13 May 2011, at 15:33, Alex Hall wrote:
>> It's for this reason that I'd prefer to keep rdf:PlainLiteral out of the core RDF specs and reserve it for exchanging language-tagged literals with systems that don't support that notion.  Having to deal with the extraneous '@' for literals without language tags seems like needless complexity for what should be a simple string manipulation.
>
> Strong +1. Earlier I tried to work out the changes to the spec that would be required to make rdf:PlainLiteral the unified representation of strings, and it's a bloody mess and I really don't want to go there. I kept my notes on the wiki anyways:
> http://www.w3.org/2011/rdf-wg/wiki/StringLiterals/SyntacticSugarProposal
>
>> If we're going to say that everything has a datatype, I'd prefer to see "foo" get normalized to "foo"^^xsd:string.  But my reasons there are more aesthetic; it just seems wrong to single out that one particular primitive datatype and say that it should not be used.
>>
>
>> FWIW, my preferred approach would be to:
>> 1. Say that every literal has *either* a datatype *or* a language tag.
>> 2. Say that the datatype of the surface form "foo" is xsd:string.
>
> This feels weird. Ok, "foo" is of type string, even though the type is implicit, I can understand that. But why is it no longer a string if I tag it as English? Shouldn't it still have an implicit type of string? So you have replaced one weird thing (multiple ways of representing a string) with another weird thing (a notion of string datatypes that doesn't make sense).
>
> I think the sensible way would be:
> 1) every literal has *both* a datatype and a (possibly empty) language tag;

If all literals have both, then you may have something like:

"2"^^xsd:integer@en

which is silly. Of course, you could forbid it but then the proposal 
sounds silly too:

"1) every literal has both a datatype and a language tag but the 
language tag is always empty except for some strings."


"Either/or" instead of "both" seems preferable.

AZ

> 2) of the built-in datatypes, only xsd:string can have non-empty language tags;
> 3) plain literals and rdf:PlainLiterals don't exist;
> 4) "foo" in concrete syntaxes is syntactic sugar for "foo"^^xsd:string.
> 5) "foo"@en in concrete syntaxes is syntactic sugar for "foo"^^xsd:string@en.
>
> This *might* work better than the rdf:PlainLiteral mess when translated into spec changes, but raises BC issues, and requires changes to syntax specs to add the syntactic sugar, so I prefer the proposal that says implementations MAY unify to plain literals, as it doesn't require changes to the abstract syntax.
>
>> As long as the surface forms "foo" and "foo"^^xsd:string get normalized to the same thing (or systems have permission to do such normalization) then I'm happy.
>
> Good to hear that.
>
> Best,
> Richard


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Received on Friday, 13 May 2011 15:51:55 UTC