Re: xml:lang [was Re: Outstanding Issues ]

At 09:02 12/02/2002 +0200, Patrick Stickler wrote:

>Yes and no. If what M&S says applies only to the XML space,
>then no. If what M&S says was supposed to apply to the RDF
>space (have representation in the graph) then yes.

Patrick, can you refer me to where in M&S it suggests this 
interpretation?  How do you reconcile this position with the text from M&S 
that Dave quoted earlier:

   http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/w3c-archive/2001Jun/att-0017/01-rdfms.html#221

[[ (P221) 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.]]

in particular:

   [[the language of a literal is considered by RDF to be a part of the 
literal]]



>All attributes/elements beginning with xml: have special
>meaning in teh XML space, and to the extent that RDF
>has an XML based serialization, we need to support that,
>but we don't IMO need to adopt the semantics of those
>special forms in the RDF space.

Are you suggesting that your opinion overrides the specification?

[...]


>Applications which base their functionality on the
>XML serialization rather than triples are broken.
>
>If use of DC depends on the presence of xml:lang in
>its RDF realization, then that is broken and must be
>fixed.

Is this one of the explanations that I missed?
[...]

>To decide that xml:lang is now going to generate triples
>automatically is going to require alot of work and
>will require modification to every parser out there, so
>I just see it as out of scope.

I would be sympathetic to that viewpoint.



>As outlined below, there is a way to do qualification
>(language, source, scope, etc.) without such modifications,

Err, I have running code that does for language, as per m&s.
[...]
>I do not see how lang-literals can be tidy. Not without some
>explicit representation of the language portion in the node
>label. If the language is invisible in the graph, then that
>means that either it does not really exist, or tidy literals
>are ambiguous.

I suggest you have just outlined how.

Brian

Received on Tuesday, 12 February 2002 05:02:43 UTC