[RIF dev prep] RE: Relative IRIs and literals

Sandro and All,

Here is a starter for preparing the answers to Paul Gearon's questions,
which he could have tagged as "Relative IRIs and rdf:PlainLiterals":
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rif-dev/2010Nov/0000.html

Maybe the mapping described in "RIF in RDF" should implement
the XML-Base assumption mentioned below.

Regarding the rdf:PlainLiteral issue, perhaps one of the taskforce
members could have a look (e.g., in the context of the new RDF WG:
http://www.w3.org/2010/09/rdf-wg-charter.html?).

Harold

PS: See also the answer preparation for Thomas Krekeler's question:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rif-wg/2010Nov/0000.html


> I notice in example 8 that there are some relative IRIs (<John> and
> <Fred>). I'm presuming that the presentation syntax is fine to set the
> base for these values, but I notice that the XML treats these as text,
> meaning that they show up as the relative value. I suppose that
> software reading the XML can record the xml:base on the document, and
> make the change manually, but that seems to be a strange way to do it.
> Is this intentional?

Referring to http://www.w3.org/TR/rif-bld/#XML_for_the_Rule_Language,
the RIF-BLD spec says:

"A Base directive in the presentation syntax becomes an xml:base attribute [XML-Base<http://www.w3.org/TR/rif-bld/#ref-xml-base>] in the XML Document tag. The base IRI specified as the value of that attribute applies to content of the RIF/XML element that deals with rif:iri constants, namely to relative-IRI content of the <Const type="&rif;iri"> element."

So, following the XML-Base spec, the context of

<Document xml:base="...">. . .</Document>
is assumed to indicate 'expansion' of all relative IRIs to absolute ones.