- From: Aaron Swartz <me@aaronsw.com>
- Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2001 11:28:27 -0500
- To: Brian McBride <bwm@hplb.hpl.hp.com>
- Cc: rdf core <w3c-rdfcore-wg@w3.org>
On Tuesday, June 26, 2001, at 08:33 AM, Brian McBride 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. > 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. Really? I've always interpreted this to mean that Literals are a subset of resources -- I'm not the only one, TimBL seems to have too: <q cite="http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/cwm.py"> class Literal(Thing): """ A Literal is a data resource to make it clean really, data:application/n3;%22hello%22 == "hello" but who wants to store it that way? Maybe we do... at least in theory and maybe practice but, for now, we keep them in separate subclases of Thing. """ </q> Looking at the code he also seems to store them this way, although it's not exactly clear. > I would agree with you that this could be made more clear. But I'm > not sure this is what you are suggesting. No, I'm suggesting that we make Literals a subset of Resources. >>> 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. Well, it depends on how we define the abstract syntax. I'd suggest something like: <rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns="http://rdf.example.org/#"> <rdf:Description rdf:about="data:text/plain;Chicago"> <startsWith>C</startsWith> </rdf:Description> </rdf:RDF> become: <data:text/plain;Chicago> <http://rdf.example.org/#startsWith> <data:text/plain;C> . The XML syntax need not change for this. -- "Aaron Swartz" | ...schoolyard subversion... <mailto:me@aaronsw.com> | <http://aaronsw.com/school/> <http://www.aaronsw.com/> | because school makes kids dumb
Received on Tuesday, 26 June 2001 21:43:06 UTC