- From: Graham Klyne <Graham.Klyne@MIMEsweeper.com>
- Date: Wed, 14 Nov 2001 14:47:50 +0000
- To: Patrick.Stickler@nokia.com
- Cc: w3c-rdfcore-wg@w3.org
Patrick, I've taken a look through your "X datatype" proposal, and I regret to say that I cannot see how it really helps to address the literal datatyping issue. Maybe I'm being dumb, but as far as I can tell the basis of your proposal is to describe *every* statement in a RDF graph by a structure using subject/object/predicate properties (i.e. the structure called "reification" in the original M&S document). This means that a statement that ascribes a type to a literal can do so by using a subject property to reference the literal value, as in (using N3): [ a rdf:Statement ; rdf:subject "10" ; rdf:property rdf:type ; rdf:object xsd:integer ] This seems to me like a rather long-winded way around what Pat is proposing to allow (as a legitimate inference, if not in the RDF/XML syntax), namely literals as subjects: "10" rdf:type xsd:integer . just seems like an order of magnitude simpler to me. And there are still all the issues of how to construct a formal semantics (preferably a model theory) for your proposal, which you haven't started to do. Pat's proposal has gone a long way down this path. I strongly suspect that when you do the same for your proposal you would end up with something that really isn't so different in its ability to express data types, but vastly more complicated to express by virtue of being attached to a more complex syntax. Finally, I think there are some aspects of your proposal that would prevent it from describing some aspects of legal RDF as currently defined (notably the distinction between subject nodes and nodes with URI labels). This could probably be fixed by I really don't see that it would be worth the effort. I'm sorry to be so negative, but unless I'm missing a key point I can't see that this really adds anything to what we've already achieved. (Hint: if you think I am missing a key point, note that Pat has been able to sketch his basic ideas in less than, or about, a page of text; if you your key ideas likewise cannot be likewise distilled I'm going to have a really hard time accepting that they are any better that what we already have.) #g ------------------------------------------------------------ Graham Klyne MIMEsweeper Group Strategic Research <http://www.mimesweeper.com> <Graham.Klyne@MIMEsweeper.com> __ /\ \ / \ \ / /\ \ \ / / /\ \ \ / / /__\_\ \ / / /________\ \/___________/
Received on Wednesday, 14 November 2001 09:53:18 UTC