Re: RDF and XML Schema types

[Patrick Stickler, Nokia/Finland, (+358 40) 801 9690, patrick.stickler@nokia.com]


> > The reason why "10" can't be a subject is because it is not
> > a globally unambiguous name, so you couldn't know *which*
> > occurrence of "10" you were talking about. Some other occurrence
> > might have some other type, such as xsd:string.
> 
> Yes, but using a URI scheme would make it easy to distinguish between 
> something like xsd:string#10 and xsd:int#10

I used to be a proponent of the URI scheme approach

c.f. http://ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-pstickler-val-01.txt

but have since been convinced of its impracticality as a generic
mechanism for defining typed literals, due to the limit that
most systems place on URIs and the need in RDF to allow for very
large literals that would exceed such limits quickly.

Thus, the typed literal node approach arose as a reasonable
middle ground.

Also, URIs are fully opaque to the RDF MT, and we needed for
the datatype and lexical form components to be visible to the
MT, hence a new node type that does not have quite the level
of opacity as URIrefs.

So URI schemes are not the optimal way to go in this case.

Cheers,

Patrick

Received on Wednesday, 25 September 2002 09:10:03 UTC