Re: Let's get the Literals out of the RDF Graph

In message <014901c14dba$8894e640$96dc93c3@y0r1d9> you wrote:
>[...]
>> I've put together a rough ontology for this, living at its
>> namespace: "http://www.w3.org/2001/10/05-string".
>
>I get an error for that address; but the following works:-
>
>   http://www.w3.org/2001/10/05-string.rdf

Thanks -- they work the same for me in NS4 and Lynx, but this whole
content negotiation thing is...  difficult.  I've tweaked it a bit,
but since it worked for me the first time, I don't know how it's
changed.

>Also, in that file, could you please change rdf:ID to rdf:about? When you
>access the file at the above URI, the term names are of the order of
>05-string.rdf#Blargh, which is a bit ambiguous, and doesn't work when saved
>as a local file.

Interesting.   I just copied DAML for this.   Do you want to suggest
they change?    I took your advice.

>As for the ontology itself, I get what the classes are, but you don't
>detail at all how they should be used. More documentation, please?
>
>I guess you're taking about something like storing the following in the
>internal database representation of an RDF instance:-
>
>   (string:U0041 string:U0042 string:U0043) a string:String .
>
>in place of the following bit of syntax:-
>
>   "abc"
>
>Is that about the gist of it? I'm not sure that I see the point; further
>comment would be most appreciated.

Yes, that's about it.  The "a string:String" part isn't really
relevant.  You don't need to tell a machine that, unless you want it
to perform some validation.   

So what I'm saying is that an n3 parser should pretend to treat "abc"
as shorthand for (string:U0041 string:U0042 string:U0043) [which is
shorthand for some daml:List stuff] and then *HORRAY* we have nice,
simple, useful, interoperable, standard semantics for RDF Literals.

(This is hardly novel, of course.  This is what Prolog does with
strings, except that it turns them directly into numbers, which I
think is less clean.  There should be a unicode character <->
character code (number) RDF property defined somewhere.  Hrm.  Maybe I
should make the "number" ontology too, and then define the mapping.)

    -- sandro

Received on Friday, 5 October 2001 15:11:26 UTC