Re: DATATYPES: mental dump.

At 08:13 PM 11/9/01 -0800, Sergey Melnik wrote:
>What do you think (Jeremy, Patrick, Brian, Graham)?

I agree with much of what you say ... Pat did a great summary.

I also like your diagram ... I've printed it off and stuck it above my monitor

My biggest concern is for compatibility with existing use:  as far as I can 
tell, P/P++ are the only approaches that support my perception of existing 
use (and also a form of use that I believe will be helpful in getting XML 
folks to migrate their designs to RDF compatible forms).  Pat said that he 
thought Patrick's approach could support existing use, but I'm not sure how 
that works.

I think we'll see a lot of RDF usage like this:

   _:Robby child:age    "12" .
   _:Robby child:weight "14" .
   _:Jenny child:age    "12" .
   _:Jenny child:weight "12" .

i.e. things like number radix and units will implicit in the vocabulary 
(properties) used.

I can also see that one could have a preferred universal form of measuring 
these things, which is equivalent and can be inferred given sufficient 
knowledge; e.g.

   _:Robby SI:age    [ a SI:Duration ; rdf:value "32140800" ] ;
           SI:weight [ a SI:Mass ; rdf:value "14" ] .

   _:Jenny SI:age    [ a SI:Duration ; rdf:value "32140800" ] ;
           SI:weight [ a SI:Mass ; rdf:value "12" ] .

#g
--

At 08:13 PM 11/9/01 -0800, Sergey Melnik wrote:
>Pat,
>
>thanks for a great "dump". I'm going to work it into the document almost
>completely, if you don't mind.
>
>I'm thinking of a running example that can be used to illustrate the
>different proposals and modeling options. My current shot at it is:
>
>http://WWW-DB.Stanford.EDU/~melnik/rdf/datatyping/fig/motivating_example.gif
>
>It shows an interpretation, which can be encoded in many different ways,
>e.g. as:
>
>_Robby ageMonthDecimal "12"
>_Robby weightKgDecimal "14"
>_Jenny weightKgOctal   "14"
>_Jenny ageYearsDecimal "1"
>
>in P(++) scheme.
>
>The advantage of starting with an interpretation instead of a piece of
>syntax is that is it possible to refer to the different entities in the
>domain of discourse directly and tell how the corresponding pieces of
>syntax are mapped onto them (for example, "12" and "1" above are
>interpreted as entity d1 in the figure).
>
>What do you think (Jeremy, Patrick, Brian, Graham)?
>
>Sergey

------------------------------------------------------------
Graham Klyne                    MIMEsweeper Group
Strategic Research              <http://www.mimesweeper.com>
<Graham.Klyne@MIMEsweeper.com>
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Received on Monday, 12 November 2001 07:35:27 UTC