Re: Datatyping

[Patrick Stickler, Nokia/Finland, (+358 40) 801 9690, patrick.stickler@nokia.com]


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "ext Seth Russell" <seth@robustai.net>
To: "Patrick Stickler" <patrick.stickler@nokia.com>
Sent: 25 September, 2002 20:09
Subject: Re: Datatyping


> Patrick Stickler wrote:
> 
> >Well, I think you may be reading a bit too much into some recent 
> >comments on the rdf-core list. The W3C has a pretty clear process 
> >defined and I'm sure the WG will follow it.
> >
> Yes, I've been following all that pain.  Sometimes I feel any one of you 
> could have designed data typed literals better than this committee 
> effort.  I really hope that you'all end up with something that is simple 
> and not so riddled with compromises that people don't turn away from RDF 
> based upon it controted Rube Golberb complexity.

That's been my primary motivation for sticking with this process
for so long -- to try to help achieve a solution that is both
useful and easy to use.

I think the solution reflected in Friday's decision, presuming
it is upheld, achieves that -- even though some folks will have
to come to grips with the fact that literals are no longer treated
as global constants (but er, that's what URIs are for anyway...)

> >Still, one significant question regarding your proposal: What if
> >one defines the range of the age property to be an integer. E.g.
> >
> >   :age rdfs:range xsd:integer .
> >
> >The triple having the lexical node will then not be valid. If you
> >said instead
> >
> >   :age rdfs:range xsd:string .
> >
> >then the triple having the typed node would not be valid.
> >
> Why does the MT *need* to make the triple drawn to the LexicalNode 
> invalid in prescence of a range constraint ?   

Because the range assertion says that the object of the property
is a member of the particular class, and in the case of a datatype
class, its RDF Class extension is the value space. And a lexical
node is not a datatype value, but a string.

> .... thanks for the dialogue.

You're quite welcome (actually, it's refreshing to talk about
this datatyping stuff with someone outside of the WG ;-)

Cheers,

Patrick

Received on Thursday, 26 September 2002 02:54:12 UTC