- From: David Megginson <david@megginson.com>
- Date: Sat, 30 Dec 2000 07:33:55 -0500 (EST)
- To: "RDF interest group" <www-rdf-interest@w3.org>
Bill de hÓra writes: > Jonas is right but not only for that reason. The RDF numeral > identifier scheme doesn't come with the everyday semantics people > associate with numbers, specifically numeric ordering. They are > just tokens that happen to be confusing to the human reader. Seq > does require ordering though. I like to see this sceheme dropped, > it seems to bend the readability req of XML (it's very readable but > very confusing), but what would replace it? There are two alternatives: 1. revise the spec to declare that RDF statements are ordered to begin with (i.e. a processor that reads an RDF document preserves the relative order of all statements for any given resource); or 2. use resources for property values and add positional information, i.e. <foo:Person rdf:about="urn:xxx:0001"> <dc:title>Joe Smith</dc:title> <foo:job-history rdf:parseType="Resource"> <foo:job-item dc:title="Intern" foo:pos="1"/> <foo:job-item dc:title="Sales Rep" foo:pos="2"/> <foo:job-item dc:title="Sales Regional Manager" foo:pos="3"/> <foo:job-item dc:title="Booth Babe" foo:pos="4"/> <foo:job-item dc:title="VP Sales" foo:pos="5"/> </foo:job-history> </foo:Person> (I wrote the above example in heavily-abbreviated RDF syntax, and will leave it as an exercise for the masochistic reader to write it out in fully unabbreviated RDF syntax.) The problem with #1 comes when you read information from more than one RDF document, and the relative ordering becomes non-obvious. I agree, by the way, that Seq, Alt, and Bag are FUBAR. All the best, David -- David Megginson david@megginson.com http://www.megginson.com/
Received on Saturday, 30 December 2000 11:55:01 UTC