Re: Subjects as Literals, [was Re: The Ordered List Ontology]

David Booth wrote:
>
> I agree, but at the W3C RDF Next Steps workshop over the weekend, I was
> surprised to find that there was substantial sentiment *against* having
> literals as subjects.  A straw poll showed that of those at the
> workshop, this is how people felt about having an RDF working group
> charter include literals as subjects:
> http://www.w3.org/2010/06/28-rdfn-minutes.html
>
>   Charter MUST include:      0
>   Charter SHOULD include:    1
>   Charter MAY include:       6
>   Charter MUST NOT include: 12
>
>
>   

I was one of the "MUST NOT"s to my surprise.

Here are the reasons I voted this way:

- it will mess up RDF/XML
- RDF/XML is horrid but we had consensus that it was unfixable - i.e. we 
need to live with it.
- however little work the WG does is too much in terms of the real 
obstacles to SW success (following Dan from
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/2010Mar/0196.html
[[

What I feel is
missing (despite the *millions*) that has been thrown at the Semantic
Web brand, is the boring slog of getting the base tools and software
polished. 

]]
). In particular my view is that literals as subjects is not part of the 
problem to be solved.
- this is a purists' desire not a practical obstacle. No value-adding 
argument made for a change of this magnitude. It's a bug. Fixing it may 
cost $0.5M to $1M say, maybe more. I don't see that much return.

Jeremy

Received on Wednesday, 30 June 2010 20:19:13 UTC