Re: suggestions for datatyping (long)

[...]
Sergey
> Pat
> > Sergey
> > >it presumably does
> > >not make sense to use it as object for properties like "age", "size",
> > >"price", "weight", etc. In fact, such use would suggest that e.g. the
> > >weight of a thing is a lexical token; typically, we'd like it to
> > >denote some abstract entity that corresponds to say 5 pounds.
> >
> > No, no. If I USE a literal as a value, I am not MENTIONING a lexical
> > token; I am using the literal to indicate a literal value. So for
> > example by writing
> >
> > phayes weightAtAge50inPounds "165" .
> >
> > I am saying that my weight was 165 pounds, not that it was a lexical item.
>
> To reiterate my point, with substantial mental effort we (actually, you
> and Peter P.-S.) can make the above statement work, i.e. to have some
> meaningful interpretation. My point is that *clarity* is what matters
> first for the SW to take off. Recall the recent suggestion by Peter to
> give each and every XML document some meaningful semantic
> interpretation. This just doesn't work, because developers would
> generate a lot of "meaning" which is in fact just jibberish. Same
> argument applies to the above. In order to make applications work,
> people who encode the data must cooperate. Sorry about getting into
> rhetorics.
>
> In the above statement, the property weightAtAge50InPounds fulfills in
> fact two purposes at once:
>
> 1) it tells us how to interpret the token "165"
> 2) it establishes some relationship between the interpretation of this
> token with phayes.
>
> My suggestion is to separate these two purposes. To be even more
> human-friendly, you'd write:
>
>     phayes weightAtAge50inPoundsInDecimalEncodedByISO8601 "165"
>
> But that is far from being machine-friendly.

fine Sergey, but I think we have to face a testcase like
  aaa bbb "xyz".
  rdfs:range bbb ccc.
It will concur somewhere presumably
so what sense do we/machines make out of that?

[...]
very interesting

--
Jos

Received on Friday, 26 October 2001 17:17:06 UTC