- From: Jan Grant <Jan.Grant@bristol.ac.uk>
- Date: Sun, 1 Sep 2002 10:40:32 +0100 (BST)
- To: RDFCore Working Group <w3c-rdfcore-wg@w3.org>
Currently rdf:type is used to add triples to a graph. The existence of the triple in the graph A <rdf:type> C . is used to indicate that A is a member of class C. The proposed datatyping document's use of rdf:type does something different; it is a syntactic mechanism for encoding a locally-typed literal in the extended RDF/XML syntax. Dave Beckett pointed out some practical problems with this. In the telecon, Patrick S. said, "it doesn't matter if you used foo:blarg for this attribute - a parser would still have to handle it [therefore, why not just have a parser handle rdf:type]". The issue I'm concerned about is not that a parser writer has to deal with this. It's that a user of RDF/XML has to deal with this. You've taken an attribute that maps onto the label on an arc in a graph and turned it into a syntactic mechanism. *That*'s what I mean by "overloading". If it wasn't for the fact that "parseType" has already been overloaded by the DAML collection stuff, _that_ might have been a better choice. As it is, I think a new, purely syntactic attribute is by far the preferable choice. -- jan grant, ILRT, University of Bristol. http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/ Tel +44(0)117 9287088 Fax +44 (0)117 9287112 http://ioctl.org/jan/ The Java disclaimer: values of 'anywhere' may vary between regions.
Received on Sunday, 1 September 2002 05:41:34 UTC