- From: Aaron Swartz <me@aaronsw.com>
- Date: Thu, 5 Jul 2001 00:56:09 -0500
- To: "Ron Daniel" <rdaniel@interwoven.com>
- Cc: "rdf core" <w3c-rdfcore-wg@w3.org>
On Friday, June 29, 2001, at 03:34 AM, Ron Daniel wrote: >> As I have stated and will repeat, I have never seen the M&S >> state that Literals and Resources are disjoint. > > I have already cited section 2.1 of the spec, which says: > > The object of a statement (i.e., the property value) can > be another resource or it can be a literal; [...] > > This seems pretty clear. But if you disagree, is there a > particular standard of proof for supporting evidence you > would have to see before acknowledging that the 1.0 M&S > considers the two to be distinct? M&S does not operate in a vacuum. I assume that we also hope to align M&S with the other web architecture specs. So the standard of proof I would like is an explanation of why M&S's definition of Literal does not fit the URI RFC's definition of Resource. > How about: > > 1) A member of the original working groups (me) has stated > that their recollection was that the two were considered > distinct. (That is a pretty strong recollection BTW). The Working Group has made a number of mistakes. It was my understanding that we were here to fix them. > 2) The spec has many examples of simple quoted strings as > values, or URI references as values. But it has no examples > of data URLs or any examples showing how a literal is > mapped into a Resource or vice versa. > > 3) All RDF parsers and APIs I am familiar with treat literals > as distinct from resources, which is a pretty solid > verdict from implementation experience. > > 4) Art Barstow asked the WG if anyone was familiar with > implementations that did not treat them as distinct. > Nobody has replied in the affirmative, although Jan > Grant said that he could change his code to make it so. > But the point is that this would be a change. Literals can be a subset of Resources and the above can remain true. > So let's turn this around. What evidence can you provide > showing that the 1.0 M&S spec considers them to be the same? > Since you are the one requesting this, the onus is on you > to show that it is only a clarification, or if it is a change, > that there is enough implementation experience showing it is > a needed change. The evidence is clear in the definitions of Resources and Literals in the many Web architecture specs. I simply don't understand how a Literal is not a resource -- something with identity. > To keep the length of this message tolerable, I will > forego the topic of whether this is really a simplicication. I'd also be interested in hearing your position on why this. -- "Aaron Swartz" | The Semantic Web <mailto:me@aaronsw.com> | <http://logicerror.com/semanticWeb-long> <http://www.aaronsw.com/> | i'm working to make it happen
Received on Thursday, 5 July 2001 01:56:12 UTC