Re: DECIDED: untidy semantics

[Patrick Stickler, Nokia/Finland, (+358 40) 801 9690, patrick.stickler@nokia.com]


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "ext Jos De_Roo" <jos.deroo.jd@belgium.agfa.com>
To: "Patrick Stickler" <patrick.stickler@nokia.com>
Cc: "w3c-rdfcore-wg" <w3c-rdfcore-wg@w3.org>; "Brian McBride" <bwm@hplb.hpl.hp.com>
Sent: 24 September, 2002 13:35
Subject: Re: DECIDED: untidy semantics


> 
> 
> [...]
> 
> > > but then how would you write (in RDF/XML)
> > >    <something> <someproperty> "somestring" .
> > > which I consider as a very meaningful statement
> >
> > Jos, which are you trying to express here:
> >
> > 1. That <something> has <someproperty> with the value denoted by
> "somestring".
> > 2. That <something> has <someproperty> with the value of the string
> "somestring".
> >
> > ???
> 
> none of the above Patrick, just
> 3. the object of that statement *is* the typeless lexical form "somestring"
> 
> I think we need the primitive notion of a typeless lexical form
> which is just denoting itself and of course it could be paired
> with a rdfs:Datatype to describe a datatyped value but it must
> also exist independently I think and identified with itself

Well, any literal that is typed as xsd:string or a similar datatype
serves this purpose, does it not? Specifying that the datatype
of the literal is a string is synonymous with the tidy interpretation
of the literal denoting its lexical form component.

The lexical form of the string typed literal maps to the string value
that is identitical to the lexical form (i.e the mapping is equality).

Thus xsd:string"foo" with untidy semantics is equivalent to "foo" with
tidy semantics.

In essence, string typing provides tidy semantics, but you just have
to say that's what you want.

Perhaps I'm not fully understanding you. I'm still struggling to
see the added utility of the "typeless" literal over the string
typed literal, apart from perhaps syntactic sugar so one doesn't
have to type as much. They seem to be functionally equivalent.

What am I missing?

Patrick

Received on Tuesday, 24 September 2002 06:48:24 UTC