Re: Literals representing people?

Benja Fallenstein wrote:


>> Referring again to 
>> http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-rdf-syntax-19990222/#basic , are you 
>> proposing that Ora Lassila (who should know, being the editor of the 
>> first RDF specification) claimed that the web page 
>> http://www.w3.org/Home/Lassila was created by the character string 
>> O-r-a-_-L-a-s-s-i-l-a? (Have the semantics of RDF literals have 
>> changed a lot since 1999?)

This one again... search the archives during 2000/2001.


> I would *hope* that "Creator," in the first example, was to be taken to 
> be interpreted as "the name of the creator as a character string" ;-)

As is done with DC, though I've run across the odd person here and 
there who'll argue that because DC.creator has no machine readable 
semantics its semantics are such that strings are creators.


> But I may be wrong-- I think it would be good if some other members of 
> the list, in particular members of the core WG, could speak up on how 
> literals are to be interpreted in cases like this.

Any interpretation of a Literal is (must be) determined by the 
property it hangs off. Literals do not have a denotation (that's why 
they're literal) - although typed literals confuse the matter slightly.


> I would take the view that a plain literal always denotes a (character 
> string, language tag) pair and that properties that can take plain 
> literals need to be defined in a way that makes this a reasonable 
> interpretation. Typed literals can be used to refer to things like 
> integers.

Exactly.


Bill de hÓra

Received on Sunday, 28 September 2003 07:50:40 UTC