Meaning of Alt

A question about the semantics of the alternative collection type has
come up here.  We wanted to construct a model in which a property
could have a range of, for example, the days of the week.  One
possibility is to declare a Day_Of_The_Week class with instances
Monday, etc.  An example of this sort is given in the RDF spec.  In
our model though we really just need strings and not instances.  We
don't really want properties to be associated with these things.  We
initially thought that the Alt was an alternative (hummm) that would
allow us to just have strings.  A closer reading of the spec seems to
indicate though that the elements of an alternative collection are
meant to be equivalent is some way yet different in some other,
unspecified, way.  Thus you might imagine "Monday", "First workday",
"Lundi" as the elements of an Alt but not "Monday" and "Tuesday".

Is this interpretation of Alt correct?  Are there other ways to
specify that the value of a property should be a single value from an
enumerated set (preferably of strings)?

Ray

Received on Friday, 1 September 2000 19:06:21 UTC