Re: RDFCore WG: Datatyping documents

On 2002-01-27 22:12, "ext Jonathan Borden" <jborden@mediaone.net> wrote:


> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2002Jan/att-0128/01-RDF_Data
>> typing.htm
>> 
> 
> This proposal appears to be more dependent on XML Schema datatypes and hence
> suffers more acutely from the probem that there is currently no defined way
> to assign a URI to a general XML Schema datatype (which is refered to by its
> QName). Same issues as above. I fear that if you simply change the names to
> "rdfdt:integer" and "rdfdt:string" there is not much enough here to say what
> these datatypes actually are (beyond the fact that we all know what an
> 'integer' is).

In order for any datatyping scheme to work with RDF, datatypes must
have URI denotation. If XML Schema does not define URIs for datatypes
(which I think may be debatable), then XML Schema datatypes cannot
be used with RDF.

Note that no qnames exist in the RDF graph. Qnames are a mechanism
of the XML serialization. If XML Schema datatype qnames cannot
be consistently and correctly maped to URIs, then that means
that XML Schema and RDF are, at least on a practical level (though
certainly not on an abstract level) incompatable.

This of course brings us right back to the issue of having an XML
serialization for RDF which does not utilize qnames for resources.
But, again, that is a matter to be addressed by some other group
with a more permissive charter.
 
However, one final comment, I think that it is possible to work
with XML Schema datatype URIs with the present RDF/XML serialization
without recourse to qnames. We do, however, tend to use qnames
in examples for discussion as a convenience, but could also use
only URIs.

The only question remaining, then, is what are the official URIs
for pre-defined XML Schema simple datatypes?

Patrick

--
               
Patrick Stickler              Phone: +358 50 483 9453
Senior Research Scientist     Fax:   +358 7180 35409
Nokia Research Center         Email: patrick.stickler@nokia.com

Received on Monday, 28 January 2002 08:40:57 UTC