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

> > From: ext Sandro Hawke [mailto:sandro@w3.org]
> > 
> > It seems to me that literals simply have no place in the RDF graph or
> > the model theory.  Literals are only an issue for RDF Graph encoding
> > languages like RDF/XML or RDF/N-Triples.

> From Patrick.Stickler
>
> Forgive me for perhaps being just a bit daft here, but what is
> the utility of having a more verbose representation in the graph
> rather than just deriving it automatically and regularly as needed.
> 
> After all, a string *is* a sequence already. That's part of its definition.
> No need to make explicit what can be left implicit and reliably obtained
> as needed. It's all about which is more expensive. I.e., whether you'd
> be dissecting the literals or concatenating the characters more often.

If we make it explicit, then computers can understand it, which I
think is the point of the semantic web.  As I understand your
proposal, every new type of literal to come along would require
additions to all the deployed semantic web agents for them to
understand data using the literal.  Not so with mine.  With mine, once
an agent understands the very concept of Dates and Numbers (via an
ontology like my String one), they get (for free) to understand all
formats of dates, floating point numbers, numbers in various bases,
etc -- because they never see that stuff, since it's not part of the
graph.

      -- sandro

Received on Monday, 8 October 2001 08:33:45 UTC