RE: Subject literals

> The node itself provides the locus to which the datatyping 
> information applies (in the proposed MT extension, at any rate. 

OK, it's slowly beginning to dawn on me that "labels" are not
serving as the identity of the nodes (for crying out loud, guys,
we're working with "labeled graphs" where the "label" identifies
the node... can't we stick with traditional terminology so folks
don't have to learn yet another language... ;-)

So, saying that "fi" is the label of some node doesn't mean that
it can't also have some e.g. "genid:1234" identifier that serves
as its identity in a triple, right?

What still has me confused is talking about literals as subjects.
OK, fine, it's really some bNode with a system-specific identifier
(genid: URI?) acting as the subject, but I don't see how that is
any different than the former "anonymous resource node" treatment.

I.e., in both cases you have a node as the object, and that node
has properties for rdf:type and rdf:value. It seems to me that
by calling the literal a "label" rather than an rdf:value attached
to the node, you're just changing the cosmetics of the model but
not the significance of it. In either case, you still have a node
and that node has the literal attached to it. You're just attaching
it in a different place. Are you really saying that

  _:x:"10" rdf:type xsd:integer.

is in any way functionally different than
 
  _:x rdf:value "10"; rdf:type xsd:integer .

???

(sorry if my N-triples notation is funky, I'm still learning...)

Why does moving the literal from a property of the anonymous node
to some "label" of the anonymous node change things? It just
means that I no longer can use generic means to get the literal,
but must either now know how to obtain the label of the node,
and possibly parse the label to extract the literal.

(sorry, but I'm looking at all this from the perspective of
a software engineer, and I'm trying to figure out how such a 
change in the graph representation buys me anything)

> You realize of course that you have walked into the middle of a 
> battle, and that shrapnel is flying all around you?)

Uhhh, yeah... I kinda noticed...  

But hey, I'm up for a little excitement  ;-)

and this is a very important issue to me...

Patrick

Received on Tuesday, 6 November 2001 10:36:44 UTC