- From: Dan Brickley <danbri@w3.org>
- Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2001 18:34:54 -0400 (EDT)
- To: Pat Hayes <phayes@ai.uwf.edu>
- cc: Aaron Swartz <aswartz@upclink.com>, <w3c-rdfcore-wg@w3.org>
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