- From: Brian McBride <bwm@hplb.hpl.hp.com>
- Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2002 16:37:49 +0000
- To: Bill de hÓra <dehora@eircom.net>, "'RDF Core'" <w3c-rdfcore-wg@w3.org>
At 16:18 12/02/2002 +0000, Bill de hÓra wrote: > > From: Brian McBride [mailto:bwm@hplb.hpl.hp.com]: > > > > A good reason might have the form "If we do it as m&s says, > > problem x occurs". > >This old thing again. Yeah. We put it on ice till we had a better idea of what datatypes would look like. >Patrick, Jeremy and I did some work on this last >year, Yes. You wrote up your conclusions, didn't you. Can you please post a pointer? > it seemed to raise more problems than it solved and annoy more >people than it was worth. If we stay as the M&S says, then I think we >have an obligation to explain, > >1) why the language is a part of a literal, and not say, a property of >it (I think we know the answer to this, but we need to just come out and >say it)? > >2) what is meant by "part of"? > >3) why only 2 parts? > >I don't think that composing a literal of (string, lang) pairs is a >particularly good way of modelling a literal and I don't like giving >language special status, but...my answers: > >1) literals can't have properties, but we find xml:lang in the syntax >very handy, so we made it part of a literal. > >2) it means not a property of. I'm not sure I'd go that far. I'd have no problems with cwm, for example, allowing literals as subjects and making the lang a property. > > >3) the lang part is the only property we think we need at the moment. >Chances are future version of RDF will allow literals to have properties >so don't sweat it. Just so. >As an implementer, the para Brian took from the spec: > >[[ (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.]] > >needs to be fixed. Fair enough. Should we discuss that as changes to the syntax WD, rather than M&S? >There is no way specified way for an RDF application >to signal whether lang tags are significant, specifying MUST here is >ridiculous (what's an RDF application anyway?). Just so - we aren't defining an api or a processing model. [...] >If we're keeping literals as (string lang) pairs, then at least remove >the signalling constraint mentioned on applications, being not usefully >enforceable or testable. Yup - I don't think the syntax WD mentions it. Brian
Received on Tuesday, 12 February 2002 11:39:01 UTC