- From: Jan Grant <Jan.Grant@bristol.ac.uk>
- Date: Wed, 10 Oct 2001 08:26:59 +0100 (BST)
- To: Pat Hayes <phayes@ai.uwf.edu>
- cc: w3c-rdfcore-wg <w3c-rdfcore-wg@w3.org>
On Mon, 8 Oct 2001, Pat Hayes wrote: > >On Fri, 5 Oct 2001, Pat Hayes wrote: > > > >[jan wrote] > >Actually, I had a stronger notion, which was that conceptually, the > >number (not a numeral representation) should be the "label" in a graph. > > Ah, that is a nice idea. It has some odd consequences, though. Graphs > with number labels cannot be stored inside computers, send over > packet-switched networks, printed, etc... They have to be Platonic > graphs, not data structures. And why stop at numbers? ;-) > Why indeed. The second half to my thinking is "what to do about it"... > >However, any concrete realisation of such an RDF graph must, of course, > >use a representation (be it numeral or otherwise); this is true whether > >it's an "RDF database" or an "RDF/XML serialisation". If it makes any > >sense, I'd like to separate the two notions. > > Hmm. That gives us an extra layer of representation, which I find > clunky. There is the lexicalisation which encodes the > graph-in-the-machine which represents the abstract graph which > describes the interpretation.... _All_ RDF implementations must represent the graph somehow, yes, and that usually means an extra layer of representation. I'm not convinced that this distinction needs to be made apparent in a MT though. In practice: literals are stored in a computer using some representation, together with a description of the "type" of literal so represented. So that gives us the potential problem, of course, as to determining which literal types (of a potentially open-ended collection) RDF implementations should support. I'd say that, at a bare minimum, unicode strings and langstrings ought to be understood. A nice next step might be (and I'm not suggesting we adopt this in the WG) the datatypes of XSD. Then RDF implementations could offer "best-effort" support for unrecognised literal types by recording the type indicator of the literal (as a URI?) together with its lexical representation, and offering a dumbed-down equality check. Incoherently yours, jan -- jan grant, ILRT, University of Bristol. http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/ Tel +44(0)117 9287088 Fax +44 (0)117 9287112 RFC822 jan.grant@bris.ac.uk (ECHOY GRUNTING) (EERIE WHISPERS) aren't subtitles great?
Received on Wednesday, 10 October 2001 03:28:15 UTC