Re: Input sought on datatyping tradeoff

From: Brian McBride <bwm@hplb.hpl.hp.com>
Subject: Re: Input sought on datatyping tradeoff
Date: Sat, 13 Jul 2002 11:10:41 +0100

> At 15:20 12/07/2002 -0400, Peter F. Patel-Schneider wrote:
> 
> [...]
> 
> > >
> > >    <Jenny> <age>          _:a .
> > >    _:a     <xsdr:decimal> "10" .
> >
> >What does the object of the second triple above have to do with the
> >two-character string '10'?  I don't see any reason that literals are
> >strings.  In fact, I believe that in RDF they are *not* strings.
> 
> Please try to be helpful Peter.  You clearly understand what the current 
> specs define a literal to be.  How is the distinction significant?

Well, actually, I remain unclear as to just exactly what the current specs
define a literal to be, partly because the current WD specs and WG
discussion has two different notions of what a literal is.  The MT says
that a literal is a string, but other documents and discussion say that a
literal is a three-part structure.

Why is this important?  Well it appears to me that two literals in XML/RDF
with the same lexical representation can end up being different, for
example if their language (French, English, ...) is different.  How this
impacts datatyping is totally unclear to me.  For example, is the literal
"10,5" a valid lexical representation of a floating point number when the
language is French?  Perhaps "1,000" denotes 1 when the language is
French and 1000 when the language is US/English.

[...]

> >As I understand it, tidy RDF literals are not even strings, but instead are
> >structured data.
> 
> That is the current status, though there is still some discussion on this 
> point.  Is the distinction significant[?]

I think so, but I am still unclear as to how this interacts with
datatyping.

> Brian

peter

Received on Saturday, 13 July 2002 06:50:47 UTC