Re: Dropping the redundant colon in N3

"Sean B. Palmer" wrote:

> Now, it's fully possible that I could post something to those URI's is it
> not? I don't think there are any hard and fast rules separating a namespace
> from a "normal" URI, because namespaces are any URI: not a subset. Just
> because it is fully impractical to use some URIs in RDF doesn't man that
> that is an invalid syntax, because there are always going to be exceptions
> to the rules, like I have shown above.

Fine we can use any URI to represent a namesapce.  If we use that namespace in
a SemEnglish utterance, then we must use its proper form.  And by using square
brackets (see my last response to Aaron) we could even say it in SemEnglish:

[http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/] = [http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/#].

> > I think we need to decide which is more important .. (1) that our
> > different languages of the SemWeb (XML, N3, etc) be mixable
> > or (2) whether we're going to be URI purists.
>
> Well, obviously (1) is important to the SW, but we need to follow the rules
> already laid down.

True .. but I thought we were in the process of making up the rules now.

> But it could be a property, could it not? What about if I used mid:? That
> would be even more confusing: is the mid:whatever a URI or a property with
> the alias of "mid:"? We need some way to distinguish between the two.

Your completely right .. sorry i was confused.  Do you think I fixed it by
using square brackets to delimit URI ?

> I think banning namespace prefixes of any sort is a very bad idea as it
> would conflict with the namespace specification. The obvious answer is to
> prefix all URIs with a character that isn't allowed within URIs (or
> namespace aliases...). I believe that percentage signs ("%") are only
> allowed to escape characters in URIs, so why not use them?

The more weird characters you throw in the stream, the more it looks like cyber
gibberish and the more difficult it becomes for humans to read and the more it
offends the eye.

> #   printed on paper.  In such cases, it is important to be able to
> #   delimit the URI from the rest of the text, and in particular from
> #   punctuation marks that might be mistaken for part of the URI.

Yes this is particularly important!  How many times have you not been able to
vance on a url in a email because the author abutted it to a period.  The
square bracket solves that problem.

Seth

Received on Wednesday, 31 January 2001 20:06:48 UTC