Re: Bad job on literals?

Jeremy Carroll wrote:

>>At the last telecon we briefly discussed the issue related to the
>>semantics of literals.
>>
>>Per F2F decision, the literals have three components (unicode string,
>>language tag, and a bit). This representation may not be the
>>best.
>>
> 
> Despite my earlier reply ...
> 
> Thinking about your message, I realise that I agree that we could have
> done a significantly better job.
> 
> Personally, I would be interested in seeing an alternative proposal; and
> suspect there would be one that:
> + would address your concerns (which I have previously had the
> impression were shared by Tim BL and DanC)
> + address my semantic concerns (which are also held by Patrick and
> Graham).
> + retain syntactic tidiness on strings
> 
> A proposal with the above features would get my enthusiastic support
> (despite any backward compatibility concerns).
> 
> Jeremy

Jeremy,

thank you for spending thought on the issue. I believe we discussed 
several options on the list months ago. I think that it'd be more 
elegant to represent language-tagged words and XML structures as bNodes 
with some 'standard' properties, and leave literals as plain character 
strings.

Despite my concerns about the current treatment of literals, I feel 
uneasy about raising the issue again (although it may technically be 
still on the table given the pending replies of the issue raisers). I'd 
like to ask the chair to recommend whether and how we should proceed on 
that. I believe that it is important to do a good job on literals since 
they are one of the most fundamental language elements of RDF.

Sergey

Received on Friday, 24 May 2002 07:44:38 UTC