What fourth column should be

As we ran out of time to discuss this, I would like to say that having 
literals in the 4th position of N-Quads is very useful. Especially, 
think about xsd:dateTime, xsd:anyURI.

The advantage of this is that what typed literals denote is unambiguous. 
So you know you are referring to the time when using an 
xsd:dateTime-typed literal. You also know that you are referring to a 
URI when using xsd:anyURI, instead of referring to the thing denoted by 
the URI.

It makes extensions of RDF easier for, e.g., temporal RDF, RDF with 
trust (use a xsd:decimal to indicate level of trust/confidence), 
provenance-RDF (use xsd:anyURI to denote the provenance URL 
unambiguously), etc.

If one uses a URI instead, it is always up to interpretations what that 
URI denotes. It could denote the graph itself but could as well denote 
the document where the triple is found or the main entity in the graph, 
as we already discussed. Using a URI is more flexible, though, so it 
must be allowed too.

However, I don't see interesting use cases for bnodes in the 4th column.
-- 
Antoine Zimmermann
ISCOD / LSTI - Institut Henri Fayol
École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Saint-Étienne
158 cours Fauriel
42023 Saint-Étienne Cedex 2
France
Tél:+33(0)4 77 42 66 03
Fax:+33(0)4 77 42 66 66
http://zimmer.aprilfoolsreview.com/

Received on Wednesday, 16 November 2011 17:24:04 UTC