Usage of literals in rdf-primer figure 1 and 5

Hi,

a small but maybe didactically important comment on the usage of  literals
in figure 1 and 5 of rdf- primer (also cited in rdf-concepts).

It is stated that Eric has the personal title "Dr." using a literal.
Following common RDF modelling principles, an URIref should be used to
identify the concept of "Dr." as an academic title.

I think I might be confusing for a RDF novice to be taught in section 2.1
and 2.2 to use URIs to identify the creator of a webpage and then to have
examples in the same document, that do exactly the opposite.

The same problem appears to the example in figure 5 where the properties of
an address (City, State, ...) are described using literals, which is deadly
for any graph merging.

I think it is important to use URIrefs instead of literals in the examples.
These examples will be copied into hundreds of introductions to RDF and will
otherwise confuse beginners.

You could also think about changing the sentence "In fact, a URI can be
created to refer to anything that needs to be referred to in a statement,
including ..." in section 2.1. into "In fact, a URI *should be used* to
refer to anything that needs to be referred to in a statement, including
..." in order to make good modelling practices clearer.



Chris Bizer

Received on Friday, 16 January 2004 09:01:38 UTC