rdfms-xmllang: a proposal

The story so far:

We have established that M&S clearly states that it consider langauge to be
'part of' a literal.

We identified 3 use cases requiring language support:

  Martyn's
  Jan's
  OCLC's

Of these Martyn's did not consider representation of language in a literal
to be important.  The other two found the M&S specification of language as
part of a literal to be useful and adequate for their needs.

I propose therefore that:

  o a literal be regarded as a pair (s,l) where s is a string of ISO10646
    characters and l is either null or a language identifier as 
    defined in RFC 1766 or its successors.

  o that an item be included in the errata for M&S:

 http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2001Jun/att-0021/00-part#33

    which should make it clear that a literal is not just a simple string,
    but a compound structure including an optional representation of a
    language encoding.

    It should be noted that other parts of the text of the specification
    may need similar clarification.

  o that n-triple be modified to represent the language encoding of a
    literal

  o that we delay determining the wording of the errata and the change to
    n-triple until issue

    http://www.w3.org/2000/03/rdf-tracking/#rdfms-literal-is-xml-structure

    is resolved as the outcome of that issue may further refine the
    definition of a literal.

Brian

Received on Monday, 23 July 2001 12:39:38 UTC