Re: DTB status (on today's agenda)

Sandro Hawke wrote:
>
> > I prefer a simple macro that is akin to (but much simpler) than
> > C macros. XML entities is an example of this, but most people find them
> > ugly and they need to be defined in the presentation syntax anyway.
> > For instance,
> > 
> >     dc:creator^^rif:iri
> > 
> > 
> >     If the above is unacceptable, in the interests of moving things
> > forward, I think the following could be tolerated, although it is still
> > context-sensitive. It was proposed in the past by somebody (maybe not
> > exactly this):
> > 
> > 1. After ^^ a curie expands by simple concatenation:
> > 
> >     "foobar"^^rif:iri
> >     -->
> >     "foobar"^^http://www.w3.org/2007/rif#iri
> > 
> > 2. Standalone: expands into concatenation, enclosed in "..." and followed
> >    by ^^http://www.w3.org/2007/rif#iri:
> > 
> >     dc:creator
> >     -->
> >     "http://purl.org/dc/terms/creator"^^http://www.w3.org/2007/rif#iri
> > 
> > This is simple enough and is sellable.
> > 
> > There is still an issue of what to do if somebody defines http as a prefix.
> > Also, leaving something like http://www.w3.org/2007/rif#iri hand around
> > without delimiters is problematic, especially since IRIs have many
> > different schemes. One possibility is to delimit these iris with single quote
> > s:
> > 
> >     "http://purl.org/dc/terms/creator"^^'http://www.w3.org/2007/rif#iri'
> > 
> > or with double quotes.
> 
> Yeah, or the standard URI delimiter characters "<" and ">".
> 
> I could live with double quotes, but I (and perhaps you) will get a lot
> of WTF looks from people who see we took ^^ from N3/N-Triples/Turtle and
> then oddly used quotes for URI delimiters instead of "<" and ">".  If we
> use double quotes, I might suggest we change from a^^b to something like
> datavalue(a,b).


This is why I think it is better to leave it underspecified and let people
use their imagination. First, our spec allows for aliases to symbol spaces
and aliases do not need to be IRIs (only the main identifiers). So, it
would be strange to write

"http://purl.org/dc/terms/creator"^^<http://www.w3.org/2007/rif#iri>
vs
"http://purl.org/dc/terms/creator"^^foobar

Second, our presentation syntax, not being a concrete syntax, is lacking in
details in many other ways, so why should we spend so much time filling in
the details of this particular piece of syntax?

Third, I think that <http://www.w3.org/2007/rif#iri> 
should stand for "http://www.w3.org/2007/rif#iri"^^rif:iri, since
in turtle these things are analogous rif iri's 
(in RIF http://www.w3.org/2007/rif#iri is something that happens to look
like a URI, which "http://www.w3.org/2007/rif#iri"^^rif:iri is an IRI).


	--michael

Received on Wednesday, 30 April 2008 02:17:10 UTC