Re: RDF's curious literals

On 1 Aug 2007, at 17:18, Garret Wilson wrote:

> So now that I've agreed with your points, let me say that your  
> points beg certain questions, which perhaps you can answer:
>
>   1. Where in all of this is there a need for the rdfs:Literal class?

You can make up any class of objects you want. rdfs:Literal is useful.

>   2. Where in all of this is there a need for rdf:datatype?

same as above, it's useful.

>   3. Where in all of this is there a need for a literal to be
>      identified *in the model* as something other than a URI?

None. You could do all with URLs but people would balk at you, and it  
would make writing things down really
difficult. In fact you could write an ontology out to do this if you  
wished.

<http://unicode.org/char/a> = "a" .

and so on for every character in the unicode.

Then you could write out a new model theory, and prove that your URI  
only model theory was a simplification of the current one, but that  
they were equivalent. That would be a fun exercice.

Henry

Received on Wednesday, 1 August 2007 15:51:26 UTC