RE: Datatyping: moving away from "literal as 3-part thing" to "literal as dt+opaque bit"

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ext Brian McBride [mailto:bwm@hplb.hpl.hp.com]
> Sent: 04 September, 2002 13:26
> To: Stickler Patrick (NMP/Tampere); jjc@hpl.hp.com;
> w3c-rdfcore-wg@w3.org
> Subject: RE: Datatyping: moving away from "literal as 3-part thing" to
> "literal as dt+opaque bit"
> 
> 
> 
> At 13:09 04/09/2002 +0300, Patrick.Stickler@nokia.com wrote:
> 
> [...]
> 
> > >
> > > I think the question might be:
> > >
> > >    Should the abstract syntax of a datatyped literal have 
> an xml:lang
> > > component?
> >
> >I did not know this was an open issue.
> 
> Then please could you clarify the issue you are discussing in 
> this thread.

My understand (which may be incorrect) is that the issue
is whether or not only a single component of the 
literal structure (3-tuple) can be relevant to 
datatyping, or whether all of the literal must be
relevant to datatyping. I.e. are all of the following
literals identical insofar as the datatyping
machinery is concerned:

   xsd:integer"10"
   xsd:integer"10"-en
   xsd:integer"10"-fi

The present datatyping specification says that they are.

Namely, that only the lexical form component "10" is
meaningful to the datatyping interpretation and thus,
even though the above typed literal nodes have string
unequal labels (reflecting the entire structure of the
literal) they all denote the same thing, the same
datatype value.

I am getting the impression that some folks are not happy
with that. That somehow, the above three literals should
mean different things? Or the fact that they mean the same
thing yet have different node labels is confusing?

I'm also getting the impression that some folks would not
like to see the xml:lang code there, but that's a different
issue, as I understand its presence reflects WG concensus
about the structure, and N-Triples representation of literals.

Patrick

Received on Wednesday, 4 September 2002 06:41:57 UTC