Re: Proposal for ISSUE-12, string literals

Hi all,

here's another idea:

why not consider language tags as special datatypes?
In other words,

  "chat"@en

would be a shortcut for something like

  "chat"^^rdflang:en

(even if the above notation could be forbidden in serialization
syntaxes, alla rdf:PlainLiteal)

this would
* make everything much more regular
* while matching the current behaviour (a literal could not possibly
have a "language" datatype and another datatype)
* and make it more natural (in my view) to unify language-less literals
with xsd:string.

Also, it seems to me that upper layers (SPARQL, programming APIs) could
continue working as they do (their current behaviour can easily be
emulated on top of this new model) and smoothly evolve to align to the
new model.

  pa


On 05/14/2011 03:34 PM, Pat Hayes wrote:
> 
> On May 13, 2011, at 4:47 PM, Steve Harris wrote:
> 
>> On 2011-05-13, at 21:49, Pat Hayes wrote:
>> ...
>>> Advantages: Gives a type to plain literals; preserves rdf:PlainLIteral specs (extending them, but not contradicting them); allows people to use plain literals without getting involved with trailing @; and allows xsd:string to be deprecated in favor of plain literal syntax (or the reverse, of course.) 
>>>
>>> Disadvantages: might be thought too complicated; takes the notion of type slightly outside the current RDF datatype specs.  
>>>
>>> Thoughts?
>>
>> A lot of this complexity seems to stem from trying to make "foo" be an xsd:string. Instead why no go with Plan A and make "foo"^^xsd:string a plain literal.
> 
> I prefer that also. But there are still some issues remaining with this step. (1) people want a 'type' for plain literals, and (b) plain literals can have language tags, which breaks current RDF datatyping. The proposal is more trying to deal with this while keeping faithful to existing RDF syntax and also the rdf:PlainLIteral work.
> 
> Pat
> 
>>
>> xsd:strings are significantly rarer than plain literals in realworld RDF data (in my experience), so it's less weird overall to de-type xsd:strings, than to try and add a type to every plain literal.
>>
>> It's not the prettiest solution but probably RDF shouldn't have had explicit xsd:strings in the first place.
>>
>> - Steve
>>
>> -- 
>> Steve Harris, CTO, Garlik Limited
>> 1-3 Halford Road, Richmond, TW10 6AW, UK
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>>
>>
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Received on Tuesday, 17 May 2011 06:53:48 UTC