Re: RDFON: a new RDF serialization

Henry Story wrote:
>
> But I think literals do serve a purpose as opposed to URLS. They are 
> things that refer to themselves, as opposed to URI's that refer to 
> other things.

The literal "value"^^xsd.string refers to itself, but that's a special 
case. The literal "123" in many contexts does not refer to the string 
"123", but refers to the value 123---we just happen to be using a set of 
digits in a particular language to describe that value. The literal 
"123" is no different than the literal "one hundred and twenty-three", 
if we were decide to use it to represent the value 123---it's just 
another representation in English.

We could use Morse code "_...." (it appears that the international 
version is "___.."---they're different, surprise) to represent the value 
8, but there's still no self-reflection going on. Literal strings are 
just identifiers---no more than a URI, with an added data type to 
indicate that the lexical form is only unique within the domain 
indicated by the datatype. Which is leading me to think that the correct 
representation of literals in a graph is something like 
<rdfliteral:123;xsd:integer> as the URI of a normal resource, with maybe 
an automatic rdf:lexicalForm property as David mentioned.

Garret

Received on Friday, 27 July 2007 14:39:31 UTC