Re: #rdfms-uri-substructure

Sergey,

An excellent writeup!

If I can summarise and respond:

o You assert that the model described in M&S does not include namespaces

I'm not sure I agree with that.  See below.

o You assert that implementations need to handle namespaces.

My question here is whether an *implementation* can represent a uri as
a pair.  The answer its yes, of course, because you and I at least
both have implementations that do exactly that.  We can do that without
changing the abstract model.

o The specs talk about being to lookup the schema for properties by
accessing their namespace.  The information to do this must be in the
abstract model somehow.  One way is to represent properties as pairs;
another is add extra triples to the model; another is to postulate
the existence some service that will map URI's to namespaces; others?

One thing to do here is to ask those working on rdf schema what they
need in the model.  Is it the intention that schemas can be accessed
given the namespace URI?  How is the namespace URI to be determined
from the model?  Does this apply just to properties?

o proposal for introducing namespaces

A fundamental tennet of web architecture is that resources are
identified by URI's.  Your proposal changes that so that rdf resources
become identified by pairs of unicode strings.  This is a fundamental
change to web architecture.  Methinks that is a step too far for this
WG at this time (which is not to say that its a bad idea.)

It may be more in our scope for resources to be identified by URI's, 
but representing those URI's in the model as pairs.  This could
prepare the way for further changes in the future.

Brian

Sergey Melnik wrote:
> 
> With this posting I'd like to open the discussion of the issue
> http://www.w3.org/2000/03/rdf-tracking/#rdfms-uri-substructure and
> provide some reference material for the upcoming F2F.
> 
> The issue is whether namespaces are part of the formal model /
> abstract syntax, or just an abbreviation mechanism used in the RDF/XML
> serialization.
> 
> Analysis of M&S
> ---------------
> 
> Let me start with summarizing what M&S says about namespaces:
> 
>         RDF also requires the XML namespace facility
>         (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names/) to precisely associate
>         each property with the schema that defines the property; see
>         Section 2.2.3., Schemas and Namespaces.
> 
> Remark: the XML namespace recommendation treats namespaces as integral
> parts of qualified names (QNames). In many XML parsers and tools,
> QNames are implemented as pairs of strings that are accessible in
> APIs. In particular, DOM Level 2
> (http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-2-Core/core.html#Namespaces-Considerations)
> identifies elements and attributes by their namespaceURI and
> localName. Furthermore, namespaces are explicitly included in the XML
> Infoset model (http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-infoset/).
> 
> Continuing with M&S:
> 
>         Property names must be associated with a schema. This can be
>         done by qualifying the element names with a namespace prefix
>         to unambiguously connect the property definition with the
>         corresponding RDF schema or by declaring a default namespace
>         as specified in [NAMESPACES]. [...]
> 
>         Namespaces are simply a way to tie a specific use of a word in
>         context to the dictionary (schema) where the intended
>         definition is to be found. In RDF, each predicate used in a
>         statement must be identified with exactly one namespace, or
>         schema.
> 
> Aha! Namespaces (at least those of properties) *must* identify
> schemas. These schemas *must* (or *should*?) contain the definitions
> of the corresponding vocabulary elements.
> 
>         Each propertyElt E contained by a Description element results
>         in the creation of a triple {p,r,v} where (1) p is the
>         expansion of the namespace-qualified tag name (Generic
>         Identifier) of E. This expansion is generated by concatenating
>         the namespace name given in the namespace declaration with the
>         LocalPart of the qualified name.
> 
> Look here: p is a concatenation of the QName namespace and its local
> part. By doing so namespaces are dropped and won't appear in the
> model.
> 
>         (1) p is the expansion of the namespace-qualified attribute
>         name of A. This expansion is generated by concatenating the
>         namespace name given in the namespace declaration with the
>         LocalPart of the qualified name and then resolving this URI
>         according to the algorithm in Section 5.2., Resolving Relative
>         References to Absolute Form, in [URI].
> 
> The above refers to relative URIs. Notice that DOM Level 2 and Infoset
> cautiously avoid dealing with relative URIs in namespaces!
> 
>         Note: Schema developers may be tempted to declare the values
>         of certain properties to use a syntax corresponding to the XML
>         Namespace qualified name abbreviation. We advise against using
>         these qualified names inside property values as this may cause
>         incompatibilities with future XML datatyping
>         mechanisms. Furthermore, those fully versed in XML 1.0
>         features may recognize that a similar abbreviation mechanism
>         exists in user-defined entities. We also advise against
>         relying on the use of entities as there is a proposal to
>         define a future subset of XML that does not include
>         user-defined entities.
> 
> Alright, namespaces prefixes are a no-no inside property values.
> 
> My conclusion from the above excepts from M&S is that in M&S
> namespaces are *not* part of the model, but are a syntactic
> artifact. Now let's turn to the question whether we do need namespaces
> in the model.
> 
> Implementation issues
> ---------------------
> 
> A number of implementation issues raised on RDF Interest and Core
> lists suggest that explicit treatment of namespaces is required. Here
> are some, just to name a few:
> 
> - Michael Sintek who was working on a new version of Protege last year,
>   expressed serious concerns that namespaces of resources could not
>   be identified in RDF API at that time. In fact, in a schema editor it
> is of
>   paramount importance to be able to create a schema in a given
>   namespace, translate all resources into a new namespace when a
>   subsequent version of the schema is defined, display namespaces,
>   identify them properly in parsed RDF content, save, etc.
> 
> - Perry A. Caro writes:
> 
>         It's this business about concatanating that worries me. The
>         XML namespace spec never mentions concatanation as a valid
>         mechanism. Indeed, the non-normative appendices seem to imply
>         that the expansion of qualified names should be treated as
>         ordered pairs.
>         (http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/rdf-dev/1999-07/0012.html)
> 
> - Jonathan Borden points out that XML Schema datatypes cannot be used if
>   concatenation is deployed:
> 
>         http://www.w3.org/2000/03/rdf-tracking/#rdfms-qname-uri-mapping
> 
> Procedural issues / semantics
> -----------------------------
> 
> There are several procedural issues that arise from M&S. The spec
> states that the namespaces of all resources that are properties can be
> used for retrieving the definitions of the properties. Must these
> namespaces be URLs or would URIs also do? Can we make the same case
> for other vocabulary elements like classes? How do we know if a given
> resources refers to a piece of vocabulary?
> 
> The issue of namespaces is tightly intertwined with many other issues
> in need of resolution. For example, the same trick of using namespaces
> are schema/definition locators can be potentially used for
> datatypes. Thus, given a namespace-prefixed resource
> (http://iso.org/datatypes/integer32:,12345) we would know where to
> fetch more information about 32-bit integers (similarly to XML Schema).
> 
> If namespaces are made explicit in the model, they could be used for
> assigning special (denotational) semantics to certain resources, e.g.
> "anonymous" resources, variables, etc.
> 
> Futher relevant issues are:
> 
>         http://www.w3.org/2000/03/rdf-tracking/#rdfms-fragments
> 
> http://www.w3.org/2000/03/rdf-tracking/#rdfms-qnames-cant-represent-all-uris
> 
> Syntactic namespaces vs. vocabulary namespaces
> ----------------------------------------------
> 
> Another important point is the distinction between "syntactic" and
> "vocabulary" namespaces. For example, rdf:Description is what I call a
> "syntactic" element, since it does not make it into the model in any
> way. In contrast, rdf:type is a vocabulary element. Both belong to the
> same namespace. xml:lang is an even more mysterious case. It is
> unclear, whether such distinction is important.
> 
> Related issue:
>         http://www.w3.org/2000/03/rdf-tracking/#rdfms-rdf-names-use
> 
> Introducing namespaces
> ----------------------
> 
> A suggestion of how namespaces can be introduces in the formal model
> can be found at:
> 
>         http://www-db.stanford.edu/~melnik/rdf/formal-model.txt
> 
> In the above proposal, entity is a hypernym for resources and
> literals, whereas an entity (constant) consists of two Unicode
> strings. In this way, resources and literals are handled uniformly.
> 
> Additional evidence for making namespaces *Unicode strings* rather
> than URIs is provided in DOM Level 2 spec:
> 
>         Absolute URI references are treated as strings and compared
>         literally.
> 
> If xml:lang is resolved by attaching language labels, applications
> need to manage a pair of strings like ("fr", "chat"), which is very
> similar, but more limited than ("http://iso.org/1988/639/de",
> "Rat"). For the curious: "Rat" means "council" in English. A special
> namespace could also be used for identifying XML structure in
> literals. Along with getNamespace() and getLocalName(),
> implementations could provide methods like getObject() to return a
> Java (C++, etc.) object corresponding to the resource.
> 
> Relevant issues:
>         http://www.w3.org/2000/03/rdf-tracking/#rdfms-xmllang
> 
> http://www.w3.org/2000/03/rdf-tracking/#rdfms-literal-is-xml-structure
> 
> Another major question that arises is when two resources (or resource
> constants) are considered equivalent. It seems that DOM Level 2
> followed the approach that two ordered pairs are equal iff their
> corresponding elements are equal (I did not find explicit evidence to
> that in the spec though).
> 
> In the M&S serialization, it would not be quite trivial to figure out
> what namespaces of resources are, since resources are often referred
> to by using expanded/concatenated URIs. RDF API uses the explicit
> namespace declarations to guess the namespaces of other resources by
> looking at their prefixes.

Received on Monday, 23 July 2001 02:12:46 UTC