Re: Summary of strings, markup, and language tagging in RDF (resend)

>Hello Jeremy, others,
>
>Maybe I wasn't clear enough above. What we are asking for is not that
>RDF provide a mechanism so that all the following four can be seen
>as one and the same thing.
>
>1) Text (without markup or language information)
>2) Text with language information (but no markup)
>3) Text with markup (but no language info)
>4) Text with markup and language information
>
>What we are asking for is just that all syntactic artefacts that fall within
>any single of the above categories are treated the same, i.e. that in addition
>to the four categories above, we don't create any spurious additional ones.

It isn't clear to me that these are distinct categories. In fact, 
they all seem like versions of text to me. If I label this sentence 
as being English, does that make it a distinct category of thing than 
if I just treat it as text? Why?? After all, its the same actual text 
in either case: and it *is* English, whether I label it as English or 
not.  The language information seems to be information *about* the 
text; but that information doesn't change the text itself.

Heres a more rational organization (I respectfully suggest). There 
are texts. Some of them contain text which can be parsed as markup: 
for such texts there is a need to distinguish the cases where the 
markup is thought of as genuine markup and those where it is not. In 
addition, texts may be accompanied by information about their 
language. This is basically the RDF design, except that for technical 
reasons we decided that text with genuine markup which was 
accompanied with language information could be required to include 
said language information as part of the markup. Admittedly that is a 
restriction on full generality of the design, but to allow full 
generality in this case was a high-cost option for technical reasons.

2. BTW, can you define 'text with markup' ? For example, is a LateX 
document considered 'text with markup'? Or do you refer only to text 
with XML markup?

Pat Hayes
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Received on Wednesday, 2 July 2003 02:09:03 UTC