- From: Hamish Harvey <hamish@hamishharvey.com>
- Date: Thu, 17 Mar 2005 20:54:30 +0000
- To: jsled@asynchronous.org
- Cc: Joshua Allen <joshuaa@microsoft.com>, semantic-web@w3.org
On Thu, 2005-03-17 at 09:00 -0500, Josh Sled wrote: > As counterpoint to your "we don't need URIS anywhere!" msg [1], should > all values become a URI? > > http://example.org/xsd/dateTime/2005-03-17T08:58:00-05:00 ? > http://example.org/number/123456.789 ? > data:image/png;base64,ABC123[...] ? > > Why are booleans special? Seems to me they aren't uniquely special, but they are clearly distinct from dates, numbers, and arbitrary data: they belong to a closed set. And a small one to boot. (Sorry if that was pointed out already, if it was I didn't notice ...) If you used http://example.org/number/123456.789 to represent, in RDF, the number represented by 123456.789 in writing, then a) you would make it difficult to create a rule language (like CWM's) which supported arithmetic operations, which would be a bit of a bummer, and b) even your app which is using this data would, if it wanted to know more about numbers than their identity, have to check every URI to see whether it started http://example.org/number/, then pick of the tail, then ... No such problems arise with boolean values. Cheers, Hamish -- Hamish Harvey Research Associate, School of Civil Engineering and Geosciences, University of Newcastle upon Tyne Network Coordinator, FloodRiskNet (http://www.floodrisknet.org.uk/) http://weblog.hamishharvey.com/
Received on Friday, 18 March 2005 02:58:42 UTC