URIs so far (Re: Justification for new node type)

Patrick.Stickler@nokia.com wrote:

> ...
> Well, Jan has already pointed out a very valid and practical
> reason why URIs wouldn't work as a general solution, based
> on magnitude constraints, so I guess we can just leave this
> one alone ;-)

Just for the record, there is another practical inconvenience (not a 
show-stopper) with using URIs: since namespaces are not part of the 
abstract syntax, there is no other way of determining the type of a 
URI-encoded literal but to test all known URI prefixes against the given 
resource URI (of course, assuming no rdf:type is used). And that for 
each resource with a URI label...

Summary of cons for URI-encoded literals mentioned in this thread:

- literals and thus URIs can be huge (e.g., BLOBs) [Dan, Jan]
- interpretation of URIs is unrestricted [Graham, Jan]
- literals cannot have substructure in abstract syntax [Patrick]
- type of URI-literals needs to be determined by prefix matching [Sergey]

Still, I share Patrick's view that in principle URIs are a viable 
mechanism for encoding typed values and should be taken into account 
once RDF shoots for an extensible and generic datatyping framework.

Sergey

Received on Monday, 12 August 2002 05:44:54 UTC