AW: relationship of rdfs:Literal to rdfs:Resource

I understand that the main purpose for Literals is to be read by humans 
or for computers to be interpreted as numbers & dates to do searches, <=
> == != things and the like.


An interesting point to the discussion is the language specification of
literals. This is a useful thing in the standard to note semantics about
literals and it is implemented in a clumsy way, if you have to notate
languages. <rdfs:label xml:lang='en'>extension</rdfs:label>
and the N3 notation is even clumsier.
but that is ok, 
you can do internationalization with it.



but if you want more metadata, I would recommend to create resources
like 

<person> <hasName> <name>, 
<name> <literalValue> "leo"
<name> <meaning> <http://.../Lion>

and so on....

you can do all you want with existing RDF standard, some things may be
complicated, but programming is very easy with it. If a literal is also
a resource that could be linked, i would have many problems when i want
to output literals... 
RDFNode node;
if (node instanceof Resource) 
 do blabla
else if (node instanceof Literal)
 do blabal
works fine for me.


greetings
Leo Sauermann
www.gnowsis.com

Received on Monday, 29 September 2003 05:31:15 UTC