Re: RDF datatyping

On Fri, 11 Jan 2002, Patrick Stickler wrote:

> On 2002-01-11 12:04, "ext Jan Grant" <Jan.Grant@bristol.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> > On Thu, 10 Jan 2002, Jeremy Carroll wrote:
> >
> >> A few comments ...
> >
> > ...
> >
> >> The machinery I find hard to justify is:
> >
> > ...
> >
> >>  - Always carrying the lexical values in the graph, and having the
> > lexical
> >> values in the model theory.
> >
> > Hear, hear. Lexical forms don't belong in a graph; values do. Getting
> > from a serialisation to a graph is a parser issue (for some definition
> > of "parser" that may include schema knowledge).
>
> If you mean that members of the value space should have explicit
> representation in the graph, then I disagree.

That's what I mean, yeah.

> To achieve representation
> of actual values, you must have native support for all data types
> for all statements, which is unreasonable and IMO unfeasible.

No. I've got no problem with my conceptual RDF graphs having any and all
datatypes; I'm flexible enough to cope with that. When it comes to (RDF
implementation X), doubtless such a conceptual ideal will be realised
(or at least, approximated) _behind_the_scenes_ by some kind of what is,
effectively, a lexical representation. I don't really care about that,
though, because my conceptual view of the RDF graph (and the view I'd
like any APIs to fake for me) is that the values are really there in the
graph.

> There can be no native data types in RDF, only a consistent means
> for declaring the data type of a lexical form.

Actually, the first half of this doesn't have to be true.


-- 
jan grant, ILRT, University of Bristol. http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/
Tel +44(0)117 9287088 Fax +44 (0)117 9287112 RFC822 jan.grant@bris.ac.uk
If it's broken really badly - don't fix it either.

Received on Friday, 11 January 2002 06:10:13 UTC