- From: Garret Wilson <garret@globalmentor.com>
- Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2007 09:15:12 -0700
- To: Bruce D'Arcus <bdarcus@gmail.com>
- CC: semantic-web@w3.org
Bruce D'Arcus wrote: > > On Jun 26, 2007, at 5:38 PM, Garret Wilson wrote: > >> N.familyName, N.givenName, N.honorificPrefix, and N.honorificSuffix >> are all single value properties, although you can have multiple of them. > > Maybe I'm being dense, what does the last bit above mean? If they're > "single-value" how can one then "have multiple of them"? Sorry, Bruce; I was using my terminology very loosely. Of course RDF values can *only* be "single-value", which is the root of the problem we were discussing. By "single-value" I meant "a value that is not rdf:List". Put more correctly, the properties N.familyName, N.givenName, N.honorificPrefix, and N.honorificSuffix can each appear more than once for any subject, but none can have a value of rdf:List. To put this into context, the above compromise addresses the following issue: vCard allows (for example) multiple N.familyName values with significant order. We could put all the family names as an N.familyName rdf:List, but that would be overkill and bulky for the common situation of a single family name. We could combine all the values into a single N.familyName literal but that would lose semantics. Splitting them out into different occurrences of N.familyName would lose the ordering. The above compromise is meant to address the most common situation while allowing applications to keep track of multiple ordered names through the use of the N.additionalNames rdf:List property if they so desire. Garret
Received on Wednesday, 27 June 2007 16:15:26 UTC