- From: David Megginson <david@megginson.com>
- Date: Thu, 8 Feb 2001 12:54:52 -0500 (EST)
- To: Dave Beckett <dave.beckett@bristol.ac.uk>
- Cc: www-rdf-interest@w3.org
Dave Beckett writes: > I feel it might be needed for serialisation of the RDF graph to > RDF/XML, but I haven't implemented that yet. Unfortunately, the serialization of an RDF graph is impossible in the general case: the XML Namespaces spec describes two-part names, but RDF treats them as single part names, and the act of combining the two is lossy. Consider: <rdf:Description rdf:about="urn:xxx:001" xmlns:foo="http://www.foo.com/ns"> <foo:name>David</foo:name> </rdf:Description> The RDF data model sees the triple http://www.foo.com/nsname urn:xxx:001 "David" How can you serialize that back to XML? This isn't an abstract problem; the Namespace for the XML Schema datatyping is http://www.w3.org/1999/XMLSchema-datatypes and the Namespace for the magic "xml" prefix is http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace That means that the data type for a decimal number in RDF's view is http://www.w3.org/1999/XMLSchema-datatypesdecimal and xml:lang in RDF's view is http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespacelang Ouch! Fortunately, neither of these is likely to be used as a property name, but other similar ones likely will be. We can hard-code some into RDF processors, but in the general case, we have a very bad mess on our hands. All the best, David -- David Megginson david@megginson.com http://www.megginson.com/
Received on Thursday, 8 February 2001 12:56:58 UTC