type-tagged XML -- symbol spaces

Michael pointed out today that my specification of changes to the XML
syntax to align it with RDF/XML [1] didn't consider rif:local, or other
symbol spaces which are not datatypes.

I see two decent approaches to this:

== OPTION 1 ==

Understand that rdf:datatype is badly named and really just means RIF
symbol space.  That is, we're just using RDF datatypes (a pair of string
+ IRI) to carry all kinds of Consts, symbolic (non-datatype) and fixed
(datatype) [except IRIs and plain strings], and you have to look at the
URI to know if it's a datatype and to know it's meaning.

== OPTION 2 ==

Have the XML syntax for datatype symbol spaces be different from
non-datatype symbol spaces.   What I mentioned in [1] would only be
datatype symbol spaces:

    <Const>
       <value rdf:datatype="...dt...">...value...</value>
    </Const>

while for non-datatype symbol spaces, we would do something else like:
    
    <SymbolicConst>
       <space>...dt...</space>
       <value>...value...</value>        [ or is it <name> ? ]
    </SymbolicConst>

or maybe special case rif:local as:
  
    <Local><name>foo</name></Local>

================

That's what I've come up with so far, at least (with help from Jos at
dinner). 

       -- Sandro

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rif-wg/2008May/0099

Received on Monday, 26 May 2008 22:54:22 UTC