RDF Issue rdfms-uri-substructure

Jan,

In

   http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-interest/2000Jul/0037.html

you raised an issue which was captured in

   http://www.w3.org/2000/03/rdf-tracking/#rdfms-uri-substructure

as

[[[
"an xmlns-qualified name is a pair of (namespace URI, name); there is no 
composition function implied apart from the trivial 'shove both bits into a 
pair'. But RDF claims that resources are (or are identified by) URIs only; 
there seems to be an (implicit? explicit?) composition function that takes 
the namespace and the name part and produces a URI from them."
]]]

As recorded in

   http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-rdfcore-wg/2002Feb/0476.html

the RDFCore WG has:

   resolved to close this issue on the grounds
   that changing how resources are named on the
   web is a web architecture issue and beyond
   the scope of our charter.

Further:

Whereas:

(a) the RDF 1.0 spec says that property and class names
are computed from element and attribute names
by concatenating their namespace names with their local names

(b) it's useuful to be able to process RDF with
XPath and XSLT, where even though
         concat(namespace-name(qname1), local-name(qname1))
is the same as
         concat(namespace-name(qname2), local-name(qname2))
the qnames themselves may not compare equal in XPath expressions.

(c) lots of implementors have looked for advice on how to serialize RDF, 
and, in particular, how to compute a namespace name and localname from the 
name of a property or a class.  the WG advises RDF 
schema/namespace/vocabulary designers

(d) choose namespace names that end in non-xml-name-characters such as / # ?

and we advise implementors of RDF serializers:

(e) in order to break a URI into a namespace name and a local name, split 
it after the last XML non-name character.  If the URI ends in a 
non-name-character throw a "this graph cannot be serialized in RDF 1.0" 
exception.

Please could you respond to this message, copying www-rdf-comments@w3.org 
indicating whether this is an acceptable resolution of this issue.

Brian McBride
RDFCore co-chair

Received on Monday, 18 February 2002 12:22:28 UTC