Literals, language, equality

Coming from a brief exchange on RDF-IG...

I don't recall any discussion here of what appears to be a contradiction in 
RDF M&S;  in particular, when we discussed language being part of a literal 
because that's what M&S says.

 From section 6:

>Two RDF strings are deemed to be the same if their ISO/IEC 10646 
>representations
>match. Each RDF application must specify which one of the following 
>definitions
>of 'match' it uses:
>
>- the two representations are identical, or
>- the two representations are canonically equivalent as defined by The
>Unicode Standard [Unicode].

and:

>The xml:lang
>attribute may be used as defined by [XML] to
>associate a language with the property value. There is no specific data
>model representation for xml:lang (i.e., it adds no triples to
>the data model); the language of a literal is considered by RDF to
>be a part of the literal.  An application may ignore language tagging
>of a string. All RDF applications must specify whether or not language
>tagging in literals is significant; that is, whether or not language
>is considered when performing string matching or other processing.

Seem to me to not be mutually satisfiable.

#g


------------
Graham Klyne
(GK@ACM.ORG)

Received on Friday, 28 September 2001 13:16:56 UTC