Re: [Admin] Agenda for RIF telecon 17 April

Christian de Sainte Marie wrote:

>    - Issue 30 (rif:uri) [2]
>      PROPOSED: Approve proposed text modifications in RIF Core draft [3] 
> and close issue 30

[snip]

> [2] http://www.w3.org/2005/rules/wg/track/issues/30
> [3] 
> http://www.w3.org/2005/rules/wg/wiki/Core/Positive_Conditions?action=diff

I would rather prefer to simply go for IRI's, specify rfc3987 and use 
something along the lines of my original proposed text [a] (as lifted 
from the SPARQL spec). If we want to use IRIs but call them rif:uri and 
refer to them as URIs informally then would be OK too.

I'm bemused as to why this should be a contentious issue worthy of 
taking up whole WG time. Which is why I'm responding in email instead of 
waiting for the telecon. As for raising a second issue to keep this 
option open and having a future debate on just this narrow issue, that 
seems like total overkill.

Is there some specific objection to specifying IRIs?

My reasoning in favour of them are:

1. They are a superset of URIs and specifying the superset seems like 
the safe default course. If someone especially wanted a dialect with 
syntactic restriction to URIs then they could add that restriction in 
the dialect.

2. For any translator working with an ascii only language they can use 
the algorithm in rfc3987 section 3.1 to map to a URI form internally.

3. This is more compatible with the existing semantic web stack. The RDF 
Spec used the term "RDF URI Reference" because it pre-dated RFC3987 but 
the definition is basically an IRI [*]. SPARQL specifies IRIs (and is 
where I lifted bits of the draft text from) and they have had no adverse 
feedback on this choice, it was not seen as in any way contentious.

4. This is the I18N friendly choice. Apart from any general arguments as 
to why I18N might be relevant, the W3C process requires that our spec be 
reviewed by the I18N WG and I for one wouldn't want to try to explain to 
them why we deliberately avoided IRIs unless we had a good reason.

Dave

[*] The relevant part of the RDF spec [b] followed the draft IRI spec 
that was available at the time. After RDF was published the IRI draft 
changed slightly at the last stage of the process. As far as I am aware 
the only relevant change is that IRIs as per RFC3987 do not permit 
spaces but the RDF URI Reference spec does. However, the RDF spec [b] 
included some future proofing by specifically allowing processors to 
issue additional warnings of any RDF URI Reference which fails to meet a 
successor of the IRI Draft, which licenses implementations like Jena 
which try to conform to RFC3987.

[a] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rif-wg/2007Mar/0133.html
[b] 
http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-rdf-concepts-20040210/#section-Graph-URIref

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Received on Friday, 13 April 2007 15:39:10 UTC