Re: Blank nodes must DIE! [ was Re: Blank nodes semantics - existential variables?]

On 7/8/2020 9:23 PM, Patrick J Hayes wrote:
 >>On Jul 8, 2020, at 4:15 PM, Thomas Passin <tpassin@tompassin.net> wrote:
>> Not exactly, but I'm saying it's not usually of much importance to say 
>> that the two literals are "the same" or not.  They aren't identifying 
>> anything
> 
> They most certainly are. They are the only things in RDF which have a 
> unique, fixed meaning. “17”^^xsd:integer /always/ refers to – 
> identifies, denotes, names, has as value – the number seventeen.

Yes, I agree and I didn't mean that a literal string does not denote its 
literal, so my language was too imprecise.  I meant that assigning the 
value of a literal to a node can rarely identify that node.

>> , and very few literals except for URIs used as unique identifiers can 
>> do so.  It's really in the same league as whether the integer "2" in a 
>> given programming language is implemented as a singleton object or not 
>> (I understand that it is in Python).  It's much like an implementation 
>> detail.
> 
> There isn’t anything like ‘being implemented’ in RDF. The RDF literal 
> does not get ‘implemented’ as some binary construct in memory. It is 
> simply a /name/ for the /number/ (or string, or date, or whatever the 
> datatye says it refers to). There isn’t any underlying implementation 
> for RDF to compile into, no virtual machine for it to run on. So…

Yes, of course, and again, I didn't mean to imply that it does.  Really, 
all I'm getting at is that there isn't much going on - RDF-wise - with a 
literal value *other than* its value.  The words about singletons in a 
programming language were just to bring in a bit of connection to a 
previous poster who tried to cram programming structures into the RDF 
discussion.

I am sorry to have muddled things by insufficiently careful language.

TomP

Received on Thursday, 9 July 2020 02:25:03 UTC