Proposed text on replacing URIref with IRI

Hi all,

I put some text on the wiki, intended as a replacement for the section of RDF Concepts that defines RDF URI References.

Current section from RDF Concepts:
http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-concepts/#section-Graph-URIref

Proposed replacement:
http://www.w3.org/2011/rdf-wg/wiki/IRIs/RDFConceptsProposal

There are some notable consequences:

1. The characters “<”, “>”, “{”, “}”, “|”, “\”, “^”, “`”, ‘“’ (double quote), and “ ” (space) were allowed in URIrefs, and are not allowed in IRIs, so any data containing these characters *unescaped* is now invalid. Data containing these characters in %-encoded form is fine.

2. There was a note in the old text stating that URIrefs are compatible with the anyURI datatype. This is no longer the case as anyURI allows the characters above, but IRIs don't, so I simply removed the note.

3. A note in the old text said: “The use of %-escaped characters in RDF URI references is strongly discouraged.” This is a problem. There are many completely reasonable URIs the cannot be expressed as IRIs without %-encoding, for example this one: http://google.com/search?q=rdf%20semantics … I removed the note, and subsumed it into another note that discourages the use of %-encoding *iff the unencoded char is allowed in an IRI*.

4. SPARQL 1.1 Query should perhaps update Section 4.1.1. As we have already resolved to use IRIs as the basis of RDF 1.1, perhaps it can simply be dropped.

Best,
Richard

Received on Thursday, 26 May 2011 19:20:39 UTC