Re: Rename @prefix

On Fri, 23 Apr 2010 14:44:35 -0400
Doug Schepers <schepers@w3.org> wrote:

> Quite apart from any issues about whether the 'prefix' attribute is
> the right mechanism, it is a confusing and unintuitive attribute
> name.  It describes a syntactic convention, not the underlying
> concept which is its true function.

CURIE prefixes are entirely syntactic sugar though. They have no
semantics in themselves.

> My suggestions for a more accurate attribute name are:
> 
> * 'ontology'
> * 'context'
> * 'scope'
> * 'reference'
> * 'model'
> 
> ... or anything similar.

@prefix can be used as follows:

	<div prefix="a: http://dbpedia.org/resource/a"
		about="[a:lbert_Einstein]">

The URI <http://dbpedia.org/resource/a> is certainly not an ontology, a
reference or a model; and it's a bit of a stretch to refer to it as a
scope or reference either.

It's a purely syntactic artefact. @prefix seems an appropriate name for
this, and it's consistent with the @prefix keyword in Turtle and the
PREFIX keyword in SPARQL. 

The only possible quibble I have with the name of this attribute is
that it's singular, while it's possible to define multiple prefixes
at once:

	<div prefix="foaf: http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/
		dc: http://purl.org/dc/terms/
		sioc: http://rdfs.org/sioc/ns#">

-- 
Toby A Inkster
<mailto:mail@tobyinkster.co.uk>
<http://tobyinkster.co.uk>