Re: getting language tags out of the fundamental model (ISSUE-12)

On 2011-05-31, at 17:04, Andy Seaborne wrote:
> 
> On 31/05/11 15:17, Sandro Hawke wrote:
>> 
>> I'm happy with the rdf:string-{Lang} datatype design, but if that seems
>> inelegant to you....
>> 
>> On Fri, 2011-05-27 at 12:32 -0500, Pat Hayes wrote:
>>> Now we are proposing to bury one of them inside a URI to get rid of
>>> it. I would vastly prefer that we simply accepted that some literals
>>> have more than one string, and adapt our notion of literal typing to
>>> accommodate to that fact, rather than trying to disguise it or pretend
>>> its not true, and so become obliged to swallow some clearly artificial
>>> notion (such as a language tag being a kind of datatype) just to
>>> preserve what is in any case a purely arbitrary model of literal
>>> typing.
>> 
>> In that vein, I think the *clean* thing to do with language tagged
>> literals is to get them out of the fundamental model.  RDF can model
>> anything, so it can certainly model strings with language tags.
>> Anything else is an optimization, I think, put in place for folks who
>> think language tagged strings are so common they need special support.
>> Then the question is what they really need (conceptual simplicity for
>> humans, nice syntax, efficient machine processing, ...?), and what does
>> the least damage to anything else....
>> 
>> In other words, we could say "foo"@bar is syntactic sugar for something
>> like [ a rdf:LinguisticExpression; rdf:language "bar"; rdf:value "foo"].
>> I know that doesn't address everything, but it has pretty much the same
>> problems everything else does being modeled in RDF.  :-)
>> 
>>     -- Sandro
> 
> Modelling everything at a very fine grained level moves the burden on to the application.
> 
> c.f. RDF containers and collections.

Yes, exactly.

I just composed three different messages trying to express my unease about this, but Andy put it very concisely.

- Steve

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Steve Harris, CTO, Garlik Limited
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Received on Tuesday, 31 May 2011 16:20:51 UTC