Re: dealing with strings in RDF

[Off-list, in deference to Brian, but copying www-archive for now]

At 08:50 19/06/03 -0400, Peter F. Patel-Schneider wrote:
> > But there's a related question:  is it an rdfd {xsd:string}-entailment?
> >
> > In this case I think the answer is yes.  And vice versa.  But if a 
> language
> > tag is on the plain literal, then the entailment is off.
>
>I wholeheartedly agree.  However, the current editor's draft of RDF
>Semantics contains, in Section 1.2:
>
>         The semantics described here is deliberately agnostic on the
>         question of whether or not the values of xsd:string are idential to
>         character strings.
>
> > My rationale for this is that both xsd:string values and plain literals
> > (without lang tags) are defined to denote UNIcode character sequences
> > derived straightforwardly from the literal content.  I think the above
> > conclusions follow from the abstract syntax and semantics as given (but I
> > don't have proof of this).
>
>I agree with this reasoning, which is why I think that the wording I quoted
>above should be removed.

My reading of that part of the semantics document is that it is not 
presuming any particular definition of xsd:string -- that comes from XML 
schema datatypes.  If XML schema datatypes were different, then the 
entailment might not hold:  it is not the place of the RDF semantics 
(alone) to define the entailment or non-entailment in this case.

That said, the text you mention may be viewed as less than helpful.

#g


-------------------
Graham Klyne
<GK@NineByNine.org>
PGP: 0FAA 69FF C083 000B A2E9  A131 01B9 1C7A DBCA CB5E

Received on Friday, 20 June 2003 08:17:54 UTC