Re: Datayped tagged literals: a case for option 4 vs option 2d

On 09/26/2011 11:28 AM, Richard Cyganiak wrote:
> You understate the issues.
>
> Every existing application that uses the Literal.getLexicalForm() call of some API to get at the xxx part of xxx@lll would have to be changed, because the lexical form of xxx@lll is now xxx@lll.
>
> That's a complete non-starter.

I fully agree. Also note that APIs for (notably in-core) RDF stores can
now typically work on a single shared representation of the literal. If
we add a tag to the literal many of the operations will have to create a
copy without the tag. I'm not saying this cannot be solved, but I fear
it will be natural nor pretty, especially for existing stores that did
not anticipate this in their design phase.

I must admit that I'm only following this from the sideline. As an
implementor I'm starting to get worried about some wild ideas though.
The solution I still like best is that foo@tag is the same as
"foo"^^langbase:tag, where langbase is some to be decided prefix for
language identifiers.  Any implementation should be fairly comfortable
with that (typically it will just simplify things).

I understand things get complicated if we want to attach semantics to
the these datatypes, so I'd propose not to do that. Most likely others
will make an attempt.

 Regards --- Jan

Received on Monday, 26 September 2011 09:52:39 UTC