- From: Ross Singer <rossfsinger@gmail.com>
- Date: Wed, 30 Jun 2010 21:14:01 -0400
- To: Hugh Glaser <hg@ecs.soton.ac.uk>
- Cc: Robert Sanderson <azaroth42@gmail.com>, Linked Data community <public-lod@w3.org>, Semantic Web <semantic-web@w3.org>
I suppose my questions here would be: 1) What's the use case of a literal as subject statement (besides being an academic exercise)? 2) Does literal as subject make sense in "linked data" (I ask mainly from a "follow your nose" perspective) if blank nodes are considered controversial? Question #2 isn't coming from some Linked Data Uber Alles mindset, merely if this is in public-lod's scope at all... -Ross. On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 5:24 PM, Hugh Glaser <hg@ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote: > Good post - gets to my (mis?)understanding of what is the problem. > > On 30/06/2010 21:54, "Robert Sanderson" <azaroth42@gmail.com> wrote: > >> >> I have to add my 2 cents here. >> >>>> However, if you see some specific harm in permitting statements about >>>> literals, please tell us what that harm would be. >> >> The specific harm that I would see is that statements would be made about >> literals given some particular context of that literal, rather than in a >> global scope. >> >> For example: >> >> "London" rdf:type geo:City > This seems strange to me. > I would expect "London" to have a type of string. >> "London" dcterms:isPartOf "England" > Again, this seems strange, especially as dcterms says: > "This term is intended to be used with non-literal values" > I note with interest the plural of values. >> >> That is true only for the particular London which is the capital of England, >> not London, Texas, London, Ontario or London in Kiribati. > But the string is not the NIR. >> >> Now the global graph gets very confused when the subjects are merged, and this >> 'London' is in four different countries at once. > But why does the graph have to merge the subjects because they have the same > string value, any more than the objects would be merged if they have the > same string value? > > I agree it is a bit strange to have strings as both subject and object, as > the graph is not joined up very much, but it is still a bit of graph that > says something that someone might find interesting. >> >> The only globally true statements about literals are rather dull: >> >> "London" numberOfCharacters 6 > But is this objection not that same as saying that the only interesting > thing one can say is > 6 charactersIn "London" . ? > Or even > numbers:six charactersIn "London" . > Which is similar to > "London" numberOfCharacters numbers:six >> "London" firstCharacter "L" >> >> For the few use cases where it would be interesting to say something that is >> globally true about a literal, a URI can easily be assigned. Be that a UUID or >> an HTTP URI which returns the literal when dereferenced. > But using literals as objects is also saying things that are true of > literals. > > Cheers >> >> >> Rob Sanderson >> Los Alamos National Laboratory >> >> > > >
Received on Thursday, 1 July 2010 01:14:30 UTC