Re: Proposal for ISSUE-12, string literals

I would like to check this line with the OWL and RIF folks. It may invalidate OWL reasoners, for example, that use rdf:PlainLiteral. there is a slippery slope here; that indeed mean that we would change the very concept of datatype maps.

I have to ask this: is this worth it?

Ivan

----
Ivan Herman
Tel:+31 641044153
http://www.ivan-herman.net



On 13 May 2011, at 19:42, Richard Cyganiak <richard@cyganiak.de> wrote:

> On 13 May 2011, at 16:52, Alex Hall wrote:
>>> I think the sensible way would be:
>>> 1) every literal has *both* a datatype and a (possibly empty) language tag;
>>> 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.
>>> 
> ...
>> The main roadblock that I can see is that a datatype maps a single lexical string to a value; you'd have to define a special notion of datatyping for xsd:string which is essentially an identity mapping of <lexical, lang> pairs.  Otherwise you'd have "chat"^^xsd:string@en and "chat"^^xsd:string@fr with the same value, which won't fly.
> 
> Yes, that's right, RDF Semantics would have to be adapted to ensure that "foo"@en and "foo"@fr (which are now syntactic sugar for "foo"^^xsd:string@en and "foo"^^xsd:string@fr) are still different. But I think that's doable:
> 
> Let's write "xxx"^^yyy for a typed literal with *empty* language tag. Its interpretation is L2V("xxx"), where L2V is the lexical-to-value mapping of datatype yyy.
> 
> Let's write "xxx"^^yyy@zzz for a typed literal with *non-empty* language tag. Its interpretation is <L2V("xxx"), zzz>.
> 
> How exactly to distribute that logic between Simple Entailment and D-Entailment requires some thought. You can't remove plain literals from RDF without changing a couple lines of RDF Semantics ...
> 
> This entire proposal breaks backwards compatibility in two ways:
> 
> 1. The following Turtle file would now contain only one triple instead of two:
> 
>   <a> <b> "foo", "foo"^^xsd:string .
> 
> This obviously has some serious knock-on effects, for example SPARQL stores that have already loaded this file now need to drop a triple, which changes the results of many queries.
> 
> 2. In SPARQL, datatype("foo"@en) would now report xsd:string instead of ø. That seems like a good thing to me (it's explainable by saying that the language tag is “attached” to the “outside” of the typed literal). I believe this is *fairly* unlikely to cause interoperability issues with existing queries.
> 
> Best,
> Richard

Received on Friday, 13 May 2011 18:46:50 UTC