"Language-tagged strings Re: Toward easier RDF: a proposal"

Dear David, others,

As another attempt at simplifying RDF, would it be possible to do away
with the special status of language-tagged strings?

In RDF 1.1 literals consist of 3 components: lexical form, datatype
IRI, and language tag.  The last component is only used in
language-tagged strings.  Would it be possible to define
`rdf:langString' as a regular datatype IRI and have literals consist
of 2 components instead?

RDF 1.1 Concepts and Abstract Syntax currently contains many caveats
to accommodate the idiosyncratic nature of language-tagged strings,
e.g.,:

> Language-tagged strings have the datatype IRI http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#langString. No datatype is formally defined for this IRI because the definition of datatypes does not accommodate language tags in the lexical space. The value space associated with this datatype IRI is the set of all pairs of strings and language tags.

Would it be possible to define a regular lexical space, e.g.,
containing "hello@en"^^rdf:langString, together with a value-2-lexical
and a lexical-2-value mapping?

The N3 and SPARQL notation "hello"@en will of course still be
available, and will be syntactic sugar for "hello@en"^^rdf:langString.

---
Best regards,
Wouter Beek.

Email: w.g.j.beek@vu.nl
WWW: https://wouterbeek.org
Tel: +31647674624

Received on Friday, 23 November 2018 08:43:38 UTC