- From: Sandro Hawke <sandro@w3.org>
- Date: Sun, 14 Sep 2003 09:45:04 -0400
- To: Graham Klyne <GK@ninebynine.org>
- Cc: Garret Wilson <garret@globalmentor.com>, www-rdf-interest@w3.org
> To understand this, you need to be clear about the distinction between a
> "literal" or a "URI reference", which are syntactic parts of an RDF graph,
> and the things they denote (in some interpretation), which are resources in
> the domain of discourse.
To put it much simpler in the form of an analogy:
#include <stdio>
main() {
char *msg = "Hello, World";
int x = 5;
printf("Message: %s, Number: %d\n", msg x);
}
Think of URIs (URIRefs) as being like msg and x; they are identifiers,
names for things. They happen to have web-wide scope, instead of
compilation-unit-wide scope, so we give them much bigger names.
RDF Literals are like the two strings there ("Hello, World" and
"Message: %s, Number: %d\n"); they are basically names for things, but
we think of the things they name as the things themselves. "Hello"
*is* the string "Hello". msg is a name which we can use for the
string "Hello, World", but we could have used it to name anything.
-- sandro
Received on Sunday, 14 September 2003 09:45:24 UTC