Re: "meaningless terms" verbage for Primer

[Patrick Stickler, Nokia/Finland, (+358 40) 801 9690, patrick.stickler@nokia.com]


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "ext Jan Grant" <Jan.Grant@bristol.ac.uk>
To: "Patrick Stickler" <patrick.stickler@nokia.com>
Cc: "fmanola" <fmanola@mitre.org>; "w3c-rdfcore-wg" <w3c-rdfcore-wg@w3.org>
Sent: 11 December, 2002 13:01
Subject: Re: "meaningless terms" verbage for Primer


> On Tue, 10 Dec 2002, Patrick Stickler wrote:
> 
> > > I'm still not convinced that "10"@en^^xsd:integer and
> > > "10"@fr^^xsd:integer would get treated the same way by all application
> > > programmers;
> >
> > Well, it depends on what you mean by "treated".
> >
> > If they're taken to denote different values, then that's a bug
> > in the application, plain and simple.
> >
> > However, the language tag might be used to filter some values
> > from other values, for whatever reason. This is not particularly
> > useful in the case of the xsd:integer datatype, but for other
> > datatypes, which contain natural language content which is
> > otherwise also constrained by the lexical grammar of the
> > datatype, this is a very useful bit of functionality. E.g.
> 
> Replace "language tag" with "rdf:value property" (for example) in this
> paragraph and you've either got a persuasive argument that rdf:value
> _can_ have a semantics or (by analogy) language tag is meaningless and
> should be dropped.
> 
> No?

I'm not sure I fully follow you.

I don't see any analogy that can be drawn between language
tags having explict and consistent interpretation (even if
not affecting the denotation of typed literals) and terms
that have no formal meaning which users are free to interpret
as they choose.

Patrick

Received on Wednesday, 11 December 2002 06:09:02 UTC