Re: Datatypes and literals

On 7/9/20 7:29 AM, Graham Klyne wrote:
> On 09/07/2020 06:29, Patrick J Hayes wrote:
>> BTW, for straighforward datatypes like the xml schema, which all 
>> relate a value to a string, it occurs to me that you could do this by 
>> using the datatype name as an RDF property. So instead of, say,
>>
>> ex:Pat ex:age “75”^^xsd:integer .
>>
>> you might have
>>
>> ex:Pat ex:age _:x .
>> _:x xsd:integer “75” .
>>
>> where the “75” is now type xsd:string. This makes a kind of intuitive 
>> sense since datatypes are required to define a mapping from strings to 
>> values, and we have used the datatype name in exactly that way. (It 
>> would make even more sense if RDF allowed literals to be subjects, so 
>> we could write it the other way round.)
>> And since it is all in one triple, the issue, about how we know when 
>> we have enough proprties, vanishes.
> 
> I think I recall Dan Connolly proposing this back in the dim and distant 
> day. (I think it was also related to TimBL's "interpretation properties" 
> ideas [1].)
> 
> Too late, I came to rather like this approach:  could we have avoided 
> introducing datatypes, and just use defined RDF vocabulary instead?
> 
> [1] https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/InterpretationProperties.html

I like this idea too.

On a related note, Sean Palmer suggests having a single *identification* 
space, using URIs, instead of having literals be a separate 
identification space.  The number 75, for example, would be denoted by a 
standard URI, but parsers would understand 75 as syntactic sugar for 
that URI.
https://github.com/w3c/EasierRDF/issues/68

David Booth

Received on Thursday, 9 July 2020 12:23:43 UTC