Re: Dataypes, literals, syntax

>    [Pat Hayes]
>    But I don't see the real utility of the suggestion [to write,
>    e.g., the literal 10 as xsd:integer"10"] in this case. It provides
>    no extra expressive ability; at best it saves a triple here or
>    there; but on the other hand it complicated the syntax. So this is
>    a syntactic trade-off, and I guess I think that on balance its not
>    worth the trouble. We can get the same effect by using a bnode and
>    an extra triple, in effect writing the typed literal as a triple:
>
>    Jenny age _:x .
>    _:x xsd:integer "10" .
>
>Isn't this what was earlier called "Idiom 1"?  I take it no one
>disagrees with the use of Idiom 1; the problem is that people like
>Idiom 2
>
>     <age>10</age>
>
>or perhaps 2b   <.... age="10"   />
>
>(I express these in XML style just to savor their rich ambiguity.)
>
>So the problem is to fix Idiom 2.  Saying "You can always use Idiom
>1" does not answer the question, unless you really mean, "Abandon
>Idiom 2."

We are going in circles. I was responding to a proposal by Peter to 
incorporate datatyping information into the literal itself. That 
proposal involves extending the notion of 'literal' in RDF, so it's 
not either of the idioms. My point was only that one can achieve 
essentially the same effect by using idiom 1, without changing RDF 
syntax, and keeping the datatyping information as an explicit 
assertion in the RDF graph.

I agree that none of this has any direct bearing on idiom 2, but that 
was not the point under discussion. My own current preference for 
idiom 2 is to allow it, but insist that what it says (in your 
example) is that age is a string.

Pat


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Received on Wednesday, 7 August 2002 11:57:59 UTC