Re: call for agenda items for this weeks telecon (terminology)

pat hayes wrote:

> 

 >Frank Manola wrote:

snip
>>  Note that we're talking about *syntax* here (this is the abstract 
>> syntax section), rather than differences about what RDF chooses to use 
>> these things for (which seems to me a separate issue).  So are RDF URI 
>> references *syntactically* URI references or not? (I understand that 
>> not all URI references, e.g. relative URIs, are legit as RDF URI 
>> references
> 
> 
> Hmm. I presume there was a good reason for that restriction. Seems on 
> balance that there is no obvious reason why RDF should exclude any class 
> of identifier. Logically, the 'RDF URIrefs' could be any set of strings 
> which are distinguishable from literals and bnodes. I cannot see any 
> good pragmatic or semantic reason to exclude any URIrefs from RDF.
> 
> Has this got something to do with bloody XML ?
> 


I believe we don't have relative URIs in the abstract syntax because, in 
the abstract, we don't define anything for them to be "relative" to 
(like a "graph id" or something), so there's no way to "complete" them. 
  URIrefs in the abstract model (in triples) have to be absolute.  In 
the XML, we *can* have relative URIrefs (like those names for schema 
classes like #Person we use all the time), because there we XML 
mechanisms to turn them into absolute URIrefs.

--Frank

 


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Frank Manola                   The MITRE Corporation
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Received on Tuesday, 4 March 2003 08:25:05 UTC