- From: Thomas B. Passin <tpassin@home.com>
- Date: Mon, 8 Oct 2001 09:22:23 -0400
- To: <www-rdf-logic@w3.org>
[Sandro Hawke] > > From Patrick.Stickler > > [...] > > > > 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. > I don't see that we have to make knowledge about a string "explicit". Every programming system has some notion of "string" already. What we have to have is a way to distinguish between properties (objects) that are intended to be strings (or string representations of types like integers) from URIs. In other words, give me a way to distinguish the difference between a property value that really is a URI (i.e., it really is a resource) from a property value that is a string that happens to look like a URI (i.e., it really is a literal). One virtue of using something like the data: scheme for literal values is precisely that it makes that distinction possible. Cheers, Tom P
Received on Monday, 8 October 2001 09:17:18 UTC