Re: rdfs:Literal question

On Mon, 17 Sep 2001, Pat Hayes wrote:

> >On Monday, September 17, 2001, at 03:23  PM, Pat Hayes wrote:
> >
> >>But that's syntactically illegal. In fact it is impossible to say
> >>that literal has any properties in RDF, so why do we have a class
> >>in RDFS of things that we aren't allowed to say are in a class?
> >
> >Not sure if this sheds light, but danbri is fond of quoting this
> >from the schema spec:
> >
> >[[[
> >Although the RDF data model does not allow for explicit properties
> >(such as an rdf:type property) to be ascribed to Literals (atomic
> >values), we nevertheless consider these entities to be members of
> >classes (e.g., the string "John Smith" is considered to be a member
> >of the class rdfs:Literal.)
> >
> >Note: We expect future work in RDF and XML data-typing to provide
> >clarifications in this area.
> >]]]
> >
> >I think this is a bit of a kludge.
>
>   Not just a bit, but a kludge, whole and entire. Thanks for pointing
> it out, though.

It was a kludge of its time: RDF folk were encouraged at the time, rightly
I think, "not to go there" w.r.t. any detailed representation of data
types, since XML Schema was going to do that work for us, and for all
XML-based languages. The RDF Core WG is chartered to clean this kludge up
in RDF Schema; how adventurous we are in doing so remains to be discussed...

Dan

Received on Monday, 17 September 2001 18:34:56 UTC