incorporating datatypes into the MT

Er..... guys, I need guidance. I was under the impression that our 
editoral task included incorporating the various aspects of 
datatyping into our various documents, and that rather than being a 
separate appendix, as it were, to RDF, that datatyping was now to be 
fully integrated into the main thread. In the context of the MT, this 
means that datatyping is pretty much the first thing that gets 
mentioned, since one needs it to define what a typed literal means, 
and one needs that in order to state the basic triple semantics for 
RDF in section 1.5. In other words, in the document I am now working 
on, there will be no such thing as a non-datatyped interpretation: 
datatyping will be built into the very foundation of the language. 
RDF will *include* datatyping.

Recent messages from Dan C and Jeremy and Jos, however, have made me 
realize that some of us apparently expect the MT to be structured 
rather like it has been in the past, in that there would be a simple 
basic RDF notion of interpretation which had no such built-in stuff, 
and datatyping would be one of the later additions.

So my question is, will incorporating datatyping into the basic RDF 
MT cause anyone grief? In particular, will it break the proposed API 
designs apparently being developed? Because if so, we have some hard 
thinking to do. I really don't see how I can make sense of typed 
literals without talking about datatypes and datatype mappings.

Pat


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Received on Wednesday, 30 October 2002 23:20:31 UTC