RE: Literals as Resources (was RE: draft partitioning of the issues)

Aaron said:

> On Thursday, June 28, 2001, at 11:22  AM, Ron Daniel wrote:
> 
> > While I would prefer that we have a way to make literals
> > the subject of statements, it seems completely clear that
> > such a feature is NOT part of the 1.0 M&S.
> 
> 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?  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).

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.

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.

To keep the length of this message tolerable, I will
forego the topic of whether this is really a simplicication.

Ron

Received on Friday, 29 June 2001 04:36:17 UTC