- From: Graham Klyne <Graham.Klyne@MIMEsweeper.com>
- Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2002 11:44:34 +0000
- To: Pat Hayes <phayes@ai.uwf.edu>
- Cc: w3c-rdfcore-wg@w3.org
At 10:09 AM 2/11/02 -0600, Pat Hayes wrote: >Im beginning to wonder quite what the point of the lang tag is supposed to >be. Up to now Ive been thinking of it as a kind of datatype, but is that >really appropriate? The basic reason for having datatyping is to allow a >single literal to have many meanings. But that really isnt an issue with >lang, right? I mean, nobody is going to think that a German title is an >English title, and even in Canada when they write 'sauce soy sauce' on the >bottles, its clear which part is English and which part is French. So I >guess the point of lang is really to *record* the fact of the matter about >which languae the literal is written in; its really a fact about the >literal (string) rather than anything like a datatyping mapping applied to >the literal. (I mean, what would the value space be for, say, lang:en ? It >would be the identity on English strings and nothing on others, >persumably. But if we are dealing with titles, almost anything *could* be >an English string, eg "10", or an Italian string ("8&1/2"), or whatever. ) There are situations in which it may be important for a *machine* to know the language of a literal; e.g. when doing text-to-speech transcoding, or Google-like content searches. I think the distinction between recording a fact and mapping the meaning can become a bit blurred. But I suppose you're right in the sense that the language doesn't have any effect on the interpretation of literals as far as pure RDF semantics are concerned. >All of which leads me to think that the proper way to handle lang would be >as a property of a literal, if only we had properties of literals.... Yes, that would be nice. But isn't a datatype also used as a kind of property of a literal? Maybe a language tag could be a datatype class whose literal and value spaces are just character strings, with identity mapping, for the purposes of RDF semantics? #g ------------------------------------------------------------ Graham Klyne MIMEsweeper Group Strategic Research <http://www.mimesweeper.com> <Graham.Klyne@MIMEsweeper.com>
Received on Tuesday, 12 February 2002 07:28:25 UTC