- From: Frank Manola <fmanola@mitre.org>
- Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2002 13:28:38 -0500
- To: Brian McBride <bwm@hplb.hpl.hp.com>
- CC: Patrick Stickler <patrick.stickler@nokia.com>, ext Dave Beckett <dave.beckett@bristol.ac.uk>, RDF Core <w3c-rdfcore-wg@w3.org>
At the risk of further complicating this discussion, let me give my interpretation, for what it's worth, of the M&S material in question, i.e., [[ (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.]] I'd first observe that the XML spec cites as an example of using xml:lang distinguishing between <p xml:lang="en-GB">What colour is it?</p> and <p xml:lang="en-US">What color is it?</p> Then a few observations based on P221: 1. "There is no specific data model representation for xml:lang (i.e., it adds no triples to the data model)". That is, the lang attribute isn't explicitly reflected in the "data model" *as triples* 2. The problem is interpreting what "the language of a literal is considered by RDF to be a part of the literal" means. Brian says it means that a literal is really (effectively) a pair. Patrick says the language is non-existent in the RDF graph. 3. P221 also says: "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." [Note: RDF application, not XML application]. If the language tagging is not available in what an RDF application processes, this doesn't appear to make any sense; the application would have nothing to consider. If an RDF application always processes an XML serialization, things would be OK. But if an RDF application only processes triples (not an XML serialization), it seems to me we need to do one of two things: a. dispense with most, if not all, of P221: not just the part that says that the language is considered part of the literal, but also the part that talks about RDF applications possibly considering language tagging in string matching and other processing. b. accept that the language information is *somehow* there in the literal (although the M&S doesn't say how). Effectively, that sounds like a pair. [actually, maybe there's a c.: change what we mean by "RDF application") --Frank -- Frank Manola The MITRE Corporation 202 Burlington Road, MS A345 Bedford, MA 01730-1420 mailto:fmanola@mitre.org voice: 781-271-8147 FAX: 781-271-8752
Received on Tuesday, 12 February 2002 13:32:41 UTC