in progress - discussion of I18N issue for request

This is just a heads up - of my efforts on the action item to draft a 
discussion of the xmlliteral issue for inclusion in the request for advance.

Here is what I've got, I will continue on it tomorrow morning.

Many URIs are missing.

A particular question I would like help with is what are the concise 
arguments for having reject option 3 from
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-rdfcore-wg/2003May/0016.html
which is the closest design to what we've got, that would probably satisfy 
I18N.

I think it's the "puke factor" - but it would be nice to wordsmith that ...

Jeremy

=============



Dissenting Opinion: xml:lang and rdf:parseType="Literal"

The internationalization working group has registered
a dissenting opinion on the treatment agreed by RDFCore
concerning rdf:parseType="Literal".
This dissent is to changes made by the working group
in response to comments concerning the last call design,
particularly comments concerning the datatype rdf:XMLLiteral.

This feature of RDF is the single feature to have attracted
most comments both during and before last call.
This included comments from Reagle (
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-comments/2003JanMar/0128.html
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-comments/2003JanMar/0434.html
),
Prud'hommeaux,
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-comments/2003JanMar/0240.html
Web Ontology WG,
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-comments/2003JanMar/0335.html
Patel-Schneider,
(
TBD1
TBD2
),
Berners-Lee
(
TBD3
),
Marchiori
(
TBD4
)


Resolving these comments to the WG's (and the commentators')
satisfaction involved changes that impacted aspects that were
known to be important to the internationalization working group,
and they were informed
(TBD5).
Duerst then commented further
(
TBD6
TBD7
).
A detailed analysis was provided by Ishida.
(
TBD8
).


The Working Group gave further consideration to these comments
but they did not introduce substantial new arguments that had not
already been made in the WG decision of ????.

The WG has considered five different designs (the four outlined
in
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-rdfcore-wg/2003May/0016.html
and the last call design).
A key attraction of the current design is simplicity.


Members of the WG have argued that:
- the treatment of xml:lang is
performed by XML exclusive canonicalization (which had
been reviewed and accepted by the I18N WG).
- an RDF specific solution to perceived deficiences
in exclusive canonicalization would not be interoperable
with other ad hoc solutions.
- long term, a solution based on a generic XML solution,
perhaps not dissimilar to XML fragments, would be better
- the simplicity of the current design will encourage
deployment of XMLLiteral, which will aid internationalization concerns.

An important consideration, reflected most in the comments
from the Web Ontology WG and Patel-Schneider's concerns,
is that unless rdf:XMLLiteral is a normal datatype
with no special treatment of language, then OWL Lite and
OWL DL do not support it. No version of the OWL Abstract Syntax
has permitted literals other than plain literals (with or without
language tags) or typed literals (without a language tag).
Thus, any solution, other than options 3 or 4 from
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-rdfcore-wg/2003May/0016.html
would require substantive changes to OWL DL and OWL Lite.
The WG chose option 4 from that message


The Working Group did accept an
****

  We ask the Director to confirm the WG decision despite this dissent.

Received on Monday, 18 August 2003 12:06:54 UTC