Re: completion of action: 2001-07-27#2 (long)

>[a review of what the M&S says about literals]
>

.....

>So: edit section 2.1 along the lines of:
>
>"
>2.1. Basic RDF Model
>
>[...]
>
>The basic data model consists of four object types:

Not sure what 'object type' refers to here. Are we talking about 
syntax or about interpretations? If the latter, are we assuming that 
resources *cannot* have literal values? If so, I will need to revise 
the MT somewhat.

>
>Resources
>[...]
>
>Properties
>[...]
>
>Literals
>
>The most primitive value type represented in RDF, typically a string of
>characters [XXX: 7-bit US-ASCII?

7-bit?? Yech. Très malheûreux. Why not use UTF-8 ?

>as per n-triple/model theory?]. Literals are
>distinguished from Resources in that the RDF model does not permit literals to
>be the subject of a statement.

Wait a minute. The subject is a URI, not a Resource, right?  The 
Resource is what the subject (a piece of syntax) denotes, not the 
subject itself.

>For the XML serialization syntax described in
>this document, there are syntactic restrictions on how XML markup in literals
>can be expressed; see Section 2.2.1.

For what its worth, about the only requirement from the MT is that 
literals must be clearly distinguishable from uriRefs (or URIs). Just 
allowing arbitrary charstrings wouldn't cut it, therefore.

>.....
>So: amend section 6 BNF and prose to fully reserve parseTypes starting with
>'rdf:'. Informatively indicate that alternate parseTypes are a 
>useful extension
>mechanism. Deprecate 'Literal' and 'Resource' in favor of 'rdf:Literal' and
>'rdf:Resource'. Mandate that unrecognized parseTypes are treated as 
>rdf:Literal.

Sounds good to me.

Pat Hayes

---------------------------------------------------------------------
(650)859 6569 w
(650)494 3973 h (until September)
phayes@ai.uwf.edu 
http://www.coginst.uwf.edu/~phayes

Received on Monday, 27 August 2001 16:15:55 UTC