Re: Datatype normalization

It completely depends on what your application is. What you are trying to do is similar to analyzing unstructured text. Sure, "12.2" looks like a number, but is it really? It could indicate a section in a book. Another example is "100,123" which is between 100 and 101 in many European countries. Why do you even need to infer a type?

On Nov 12, 2010, at 12:33 , Nathan wrote:

> Hi All,
> 
> I'd suggest that a high percentage of the worlds RDF data is being published untyped, where plain literals are used as rather than typed literals "12.2" vs "12.2"^^xsd:decimal, and also (to a lesser extent) "strings as"^^xsd:string's.
> 
> Until today, I had assumed that it was pretty "safe" to, upon parsing, turn xsd:strings in to plain literals / pull the datatype from the range of a property and turn the object in to the correct type.
> 
> However, it's been suggested to me today that this probably isn't a good thing / "the right thing" to do.
> 
> And thus, should I be avoiding implementing this feature, and additionally what are the reasons *not* to do this.
> 
> An example:
> 
> Ontology contains..
>   ex:prop rdfs:range xsd:decimal .
> 
> "data" contains..
>   :foo ex:prop "12.2" .
> 
> What reason would there be not to just infer/pull the type and convert to a typed literal?
> 
> Best,
> 
> Nathan
> 
> seeAlso:
> http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-plain-literal/
> http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/InterpretationProperties.html
> 
> 

-- 
Dr. Axel Rauschmayer
Axel.Rauschmayer@ifi.lmu.de
http://hypergraphs.de/
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Received on Friday, 12 November 2010 11:48:54 UTC