Re: RDF's curious literals

Bruce D'Arcus wrote:
> Not having been involved in any of this, I wouldn't be surprised if 
> there wasn't a fair bit of pressure from the W3C community to have a 
> notion of datatype in RDF that could be more-or-less consistent with 
> datatypes used in other W3C efforts (say, XML Schema and XQuery). 
> Surely that would be a good enough reason, even if it might not be the 
> best technical reason.

That's probably a good idea---I want to use the way XML Schema models 
integers and booleans and such.

That doesn't mean we have to create some new thing called rdfs:Literal 
in the RDF model. We could just as easily construct a URI identifier 
from the XML Schema datatype URI, combined with the lexical form in 
question. This would allow integers and such to be used just like any 
other RDF resource, but could leverage all the semantics provided by XML 
Schema.

Reusing work done by XML Schema does not mean we can't have a consistent 
RDF data model---we could easily do both. If the hardest problem we're 
having here is coming to consensus on how to combine an XML Scheme 
datatype URI and a lexical form into a combined URI, that's a small 
problem indeed. *Any* such URI would be better than making the RDF data 
model inconsistent, as has been done.

Garret

Received on Wednesday, 1 August 2007 19:38:51 UTC