Re: Literals representing people?

At 12:49 28/09/03 +0100, Bill de hÓra wrote:
>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.

This is not true in the current semantics.

Almost the reverse:  literals are the only form of graph nodes that have a 
specified denotation independent of the interpretation (model theoretic 
sense) that is used.

I think the point w.r.t. dc:creator is more to do with the fact that this 
*property* has a rather vague definition, which might be extended to read 
something like:

"""
dc:creator indicates that its subject resource is some kind of document 
that was created by either (a) the person denoted by its object resource, 
or (b) the person whose name is the string denoted by its object resource.
"""

This definition is incomplete -- it doesn't allow for, say, institutional 
creatorship, which I think is OK for dc:creator, but I hope that it 
illustrates the idea that the *meaning* of an RDF statement can be broader 
than the simple notion that the object is a property of the subject.
In particular the fact that the object of dc:creator may denote a string 
value, it doesn't mean that the statement as a whole cannot refer 
(indirectly) to something richer than a sequence of characters.  (That such 
semantic gymnastics are possible doesn't necessarily mean they're good 
modelling, but that's for another debate.)

#g


------------
Graham Klyne
GK@NineByNine.org

Received on Monday, 29 September 2003 06:09:22 UTC