Re: draft partitioning of the issues

Aaron Swartz wrote:

> > Is there any doubt that as far as m&s is concerned:
> >
> >   o literals are not allowed as subjects
> >   o literals are not resources
> 
> I do not see either of these stated in the spec. M&S says:
> 
>          pred is a property (member of Properties), sub is a resource
>         (member of Resources), and obj is either a resource or a
>         literal (member of Literals).
> 
> but it never says that literals and resources are disjoint in
> any normative portion of the document (to my knowledge, after a
> quick search).

Yes, I think you are right that it does not state explicitly that they
are disjoint.  In reading the spec I ascribe some information to the
fact that m&s calls out that an object can be either a resource or a
literal and says only that subject is a member of resources.  Whilst this
may not be a mathematically precise statement that resources and
literals are disjoint, it seems pretty clear that it was the intent
that they are and that subjects may not therefore be literals.

I would agree with you that this could be made more clear.  But I'm
not sure this is what you are suggesting.


> 
> > Which is maybe not how some folks would like it to be.  If we
> > considered
> > introducing this change, do you think we would need a syntax change to
> > represent it?  Of course, anyone can now use data uri's now if
> > they want to.
> > We don't have to do anything to support that.
> 
> No, I do not think a syntax change is necessary. This is simply
> a change to the abstract syntax.

Could you give an example of using the current RDF/XML syntax to
represent a literal as a subject.

Brian

Received on Tuesday, 26 June 2001 09:36:00 UTC