Re: RDF's curious literals

>  So let me go back to my original question: How is a literal different from a 
>  resource? My answer is that there should be *no* difference.
agreed. ive posted 2 entries on the subject, sort of to get a sense of exactly how to refactor my triplestore to support it:

http://blog.whats-your.name/post/2007/07/31/RDF-20-literals-are-resources
http://blog.whats-your.name/post/2007/07/31/death-of-rdf-literals-pt-2

Tim's post on the datatypes is insightful - i had no idea that literals are basically resources in N3. that notion seems to have been destroyed in all the existing RDF libs ive tried, where it gives literals their own class, chops off their legs wrt functionality ..

theres a few issues in terms of topography - when to use the resource as the uri (123 or :cat), when to use a 'value' property on the resource (eg URI is a hash of a larger string value), and when to you use the dereferenced content of the URI as the value.. as i finish implementing our thoughts on this matter in my Ruby triplestore ( http://whats-your.name/yard ), i'll get back to you on the decisions settled on here.


literals are resources, and blobs are blobs. blobs can be referred to by resources - literal dataType becomes a resource Type, and any localization stuff is done via the predicate or blank nodes instead of weird literal serialization-specific constructs

are there any existing stores / browsers that let you browse around literals as real nodes, showing links in both direction?

Received on Tuesday, 31 July 2007 22:12:08 UTC