Re: A simple question....

Jonas Liljegren wrote:
> 
> Pierre-Antoine CHAMPIN wrote:
> >
> > Jonas Liljegren wrote:
> > > With schemas, you could specify that an URI is an instance of some
> > > type.  Literals is said to be an instance of the Literal class. You
> > > can subclass the literal class and set the type of the URI to be a
> > > specific type of value.
> >
> > such types already exist on the web : mime-types.
> > I already suggested that Litterals should not be different from resources in RDF,
> > but should be anonymous resources with text/plain mime type.
> 
> How would you represent that in RDF?

I guess the mime-type is an attribute of the resource.
If it can be retrieved (typically, by HTTP for 'http:*' URIs)
then the mime-type will come with it.
If it can't be retrieved, well you won't really care about the mime-type...

Which doesn't exclude explicit representation of mime-types in RDF, like

  <rdf:Description about="...">
    <rdf:type resource="http://somewhere.org/mimetypes/text/plain" />
  </rdf:Description>

> There could be many things that would be plain text but that you would like to
> specify closer, like a date. To say that it is text/plain is not enough.

We have XML-Schema working on the defining of datatypes.
I guess we could have new mime-types like "x-xmls/string" for built-in datatypes ;
for user-defined datatypes, I still don't see a better way than explicit typing (like above).


I really think considering resource-types in general is more important
than considering resources on one hand, and literals on the other hand.
RDF authors admit the dichotomy Resource/Literal is not satisfying,
I'm sure their would be a great profit in unifying them,
and I guess considering (mime?) types of resource content is the key.

  Pierre-Antoine

Received on Thursday, 9 December 1999 04:01:28 UTC