namespace prefix definitions in presentation syntax

Dear all,

I just tried to write down some RIF presentation syntax... (I know I 
shouldn't do this) ... and realized that we don't have any way to define 
namespace prefixes there although we use curies allover...

So I thought we shall reuse one of the established syntaxes here instead 
of reinventing the wheel.

3 alternatives come to my mind:

TURTLE:

@prefix prefix: <IRI>.

SPARQL:

PREFIX prefix: <IRI>

XQuery:

declare namespace prefix="IRI"

for the moment, I suggest to us the latter, because
we never use angle bracketted IRI's  in the document.

BTW: We might want to switch to angle brackets in the end, because
with curies alone, we cannot express all URIs (that is acxtually a 
severe problem in RDF/XML, btw, where properties can only be CURIEs)

  e.g. assume I have a datatype "http://mydatatype.com/"

I cannot write:

   "12345"^^http://mydatatype.com/

because we have only CURIEs in the datatype position (didn't see other 
examples so far) and the pain thing is that http://mydatatype.com/ 
cannot really be synbtactically be split into a QName.

obviously, we don't want to end up in

   "12345"^^"ttp://mydatatype.com/"^^rif:iri

which BTW could then be written as:

   "12345"^^"htttp://mydatatype.com/"^^"http://theIRIforRifIRI"^^rif:iri

which actually could be written as:
 
"12345"^^"ttp://mydatatype.com/"^^"http://theIRIforRifIRI"^^"http://theIRIforRifIRI"^^rif:iri

...

right?

Axel









-- 
Dr. Axel Polleres
email: axel@polleres.net  url: http://www.polleres.net/

rdfs:Resource owl:differentFrom xsd:anyURI .