- From: Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org>
- Date: 27 Feb 2002 10:41:40 -0600
- To: Pat Hayes <phayes@ai.uwf.edu>
- Cc: Brian McBride <bwm@hplb.hpl.hp.com>, w3c-rdfcore-wg@w3.org
On Wed, 2002-02-27 at 10:25, Pat Hayes wrote: > >At 11:02 12/02/2002 +0200, Patrick Stickler wrote: [...] > >I read M&S and it said that language is part of the literal, so that > >is how I wrote the code. In Jena, a literal is a pair, as defined > >in M&S. > > Well, Brian, surely you might have mentioned this before, As I said before, several folks did mention it a long time ago, but after while, we got tired of saying "string or string with lang or XML thingy" and just said string. I was pretty careful to be sure the way we resolved the lang issue doesn't matter to the model theory. To the model theory, a literal is still just a string. We can encode two strings in one, after all, no? Here's the n-triples design DaveB and I kicked around after the meeting: ("abc", 'en') -> "abc"-en ("abc", none) -> "abc" ("abc", 'fr') -> "abc"-fr Also, for XML literals, we'll have xml("canonical-form...", "en"). The point is: the literal is syntactically evident in the RDF document. > when the > datatyping discussion was in full progress, all predicated on the > assumption (and indeed the frequent explicit assertion, to which > nobody raised the slightest objection) that literals were strings. If > literals are not strings, then we have to go and do all that again, > because NONE of it makes any sense at all. What is the result of > applying the lexical-to-value mapping of xsd:number to the pair > ("34", "french") ? same as the result of applying it to "blarf": you lose. > >A good reason might have the form "If we do it as m&s says, problem x occurs". > > Well, one problem for us is that we will have to re-open the > datatyping discussion again from square one. I don't think so. > For example, if literals > can be pairs, then we could put the datatype name in the second slot > of the pair, no... the pair comes from RDF/XML syntax. Eventually, you're going to have to take a peek at the syntax, Pat. ;-) For the examples above, that's: <rdf:Description rdf:about="http://example/something"> <dc:title xml:lang="en">abc</dc:title> </rdf:Description> becomes <http://example/something> <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/title> "abc"-en. If you want to muck with things in n-triples, you have to reflect them back into RDF/XML. > - a solution which I believe was considered, but > rejected on the grounds that literals were NOT pairs, as I recall. -- Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
Received on Wednesday, 27 February 2002 11:42:44 UTC