Re: Proposed NTriples changes for literal notation

At 04:31 PM 3/13/02 -0500, Tim Berners-Lee wrote:
>I accept the form of these literals only in the context of an attempt to
>formalize the
>RDF spec as it is, but not as an endorsement of the way forward.  For the
>future,
>I hope that RDF will move toward unicode strings as primitives, and
>langauges as properties.  { "chat"en  =  [lang:en "chat"].}

I, for one, am beginning to feel as if I'm losing sight of the larger 
picture here (WG-fatigue, or something?).  I, too, very much prefer this 
"interpretation property" approach and do not exactly recall what 
considerations have lead us down the other route...

... my concern, and the reason I am responding, is that I think the current 
approach to datatyping semantics will make it more difficult to make the 
future transition suggested here.  I.e. that literals always denote 
themselves in the semantic domain.  It would be easier to see how the 
transition could be effected under datatyping schemes that have literals 
denote values, as then one could imagine defining an equivalence between 
the following:

     ex:someSubj ex:value "chat"en .
and
     ex:someSubj ex:value [ lang:en "chat" ] .

I raise this with some trepidation, as to fix this might involve pulling up 
our stake-in-the-ground regarding datatyping.  So, my question to the WG 
is:  is this something we should be concerned about?

#g



-------------------
Graham Klyne
<GK@NineByNine.org>

Received on Thursday, 14 March 2002 06:34:58 UTC