RE: xmlns, uri+name pairs or just uris..? Clarification needed.

There is the 'rdfs:isDefinedIn' property in rdf schema, which connects a
resource to its namespace (well, properties, classes etc anyway). Not all
identified resources (eg. uuid:, tel: URIs) fall into two parts in this
way, but you might imagine a convention for rdf parsers to emit additional
'isDefinedIn' triples when parsing xml namespaced rdf serialisations,
preserving the namespace info more accurately. For the about="..." and
resource="" constructs, where qnames arent currently used, we're a little
stuck. 

My take on this would be to say that the rdf 1.0 syntax doesn't always
make this information available, and the rdf model doesnt require that it
is available, but that model and schema provide representations for it
when it _is_ available. 

One strategy for dealing with this kind of partial knowledge would be to
explore ways of acquiring, exchanging, aggregating information about rdf
vocabularies, since once we know their uris we can identify names within
those namespaces... 

dan


On Fri, 28 Jul 2000, McBride, Brian wrote:

> Hi Perry,
> > 
> > My opinion, which I know is shared by at least some of the 
> > implementors on
> > this list, is that this part of the RDF spec is in error.
> 
> Yup!  I got very confused by this at one point.  I've come to a 
> sort of 'well we can live with it ...' sort of position in my own
> mind, but its not very pretty.
> 
> 
> > ... the relevant stuff justifying the assertion that
> 
>  as far as
>      XML is concerned, a qname is a pair (ns, locaname) not the
>      concatenation of ns and localname, i.e.
> 
>      <x xmlns:fo="fo" xmlns:foo="foo">
>        <y fo:obar="a" foo:bar="b"/>
>  
>      is legal - the attribute names are distinct even though
>      they concatenate to the same string.
> 
> Whilst the NS spec is not absolutely precise on this, it seems like best
> interpretation.
>  
> > 
> > I think you can guess from the above how I chose to implement 
> > expanded names
> > in our RDF processor and API.
> > 
> 
> Me too.  In my SQL stuff I separate out the namespace part and the
> localname part into different tables.
> 
> There are different opinions here.  You may recall that I asked
> Sergey to modify his java api to pass the qname structure through
> the API rather than the URI.  He refused on the grounds all you
> need in the model is the URI.
> 
> With my usual caveats of I'm new to this and not the expert, here
> is my current reasoning:
> 
> XML does define a qname to be a pair(namespace, localname).  RDF
> models however, are defined in terms of URI references.  Resources are
> identified by a URI reference as are properties.
> 
> The current RDF XML serialization makes use of XML qnames to represent
> URI references.  RDF defines a mapping from qnames to URI references,
> which is, unfortunately, to simply concatenate the two.
> 
> So given a qname from an XML processor, an RDF processor can determine
> what URI reference the pair representing the qname represents.
> 
> The mapping is not a one to one mapping, i.e. there are several qnames, that
> at least syntactically could represent an arbritary URI reference.
> Unfortunately, this is a potential problem.  Given a URI reference for
> a property, it is important to be able to determine the correct namespace
> for that property because the namespace defines the schema that defines
> its interpretation.
> 
> So when, for example, a URI reference for a property is encountred say as
> the
> value of an rdf:about or rdf:resource reference, it is not in general
> possible to determine what schema applies to that property just by
> processing the URI.  In the words of the sage, BUMMER!
> 
> However, if a convention that all namespace URI references used for RDF
> will end in a character that cannot appear in the localname part of qname,
> then it is possible to determine the correct namespace from the URI of 
> a property alone.  The current SiRPAC implementation relies on this.
> Given this conduct, the flaw is not deadly.  I have seen published examples
> of RDF schemas that did not adopt this convention, but I'm not sure
> which ones - possibly the document on how to represent dublin core in RDF,
> but I'm not sure.
> 
> Comments?
> 
> Perry, do you have a java parser that will pass through the qname pair
> rather
> than the URI?
> 
> Brian
>

Received on Friday, 28 July 2000 06:46:35 UTC