Re: report on coverage issue

On Sep 19, 2006, at 10:26 AM, Francois Bry wrote:

[snipped parts with which I'm mostly in agreement]
> 2. I would suggest to distinguish between language "fragments" and
> "dialects". A fragment is a part of the language (like English without
> the passive mode or Prolog without negation as failure). Dialects are
> language (*)  that have sligthly different syntaxes and grammars  
> but the
> same expressive power as the lnaguages they are related to (eg  
> Bavarian
> or Swiss German are dialect of "High German", both with words that do
> not exist in German and specific grammars. Another example are the
> varios serializations of RDF: they are RDF dialects but, if they  
> are not
> incomplete, no fragments).

I don't know if it's worth calling out, but I think of the various  
serializations of RDF as notational variants of each other. It's not  
just that they have the same expressive power, but they correspond  
pretty exactly to the same (not too) abstract syntax tree.

Are RDF and RDFS dialects of each other? RDF is sorta kinda a  
fragment of RDFS (but not a syntactic fragment). I would think of RDF  
with BNodes interpreted as denoting terms or with the UNA as dialects  
of RDF.

The W3C (e.g., the WebArch document) tends to talk about "Extensions"  
rather than "fragments", FWIW. I don't think that's the most helpful  
way of thinking about things, but, eh.

Cheers,
Bijan.

Received on Tuesday, 19 September 2006 09:37:23 UTC