RE: SWRL string builtins -- suggestion

I'm not sure what sort of abuse of a "charat" relation you are worried about, but certainly such abuse must already be possible via swrlb:substring, which allows one-character substrings to be referenced via rules.

My feeling is that since OWL has adopted the XML schema standard datatype "string" it is unreasonable to place part of that standard outside the scope of "rules" SOLELY because it might be misused.  It is clear that the standard (quoted below) makes a "charat" relation well defined.  Any application program that obtains a  string value from OWL can readily obtain the integer codes of the individual charcters of that string with trivial library APIs available in every programming langauge.  My suggestion is simply that the built-ins of a rules standard should cover this aspect of the string type. 

In any case, we should not think of the type "string" as synonymous with "natural language text".  Strings are also used to represent fragments of programming language source code and network protocols and passwords and DNA codes and many other things which are not natural language at all.

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from http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/WD-xmlschema-2-20000225
3.2.1 string
[Definition:]  The string datatype represents character strings in XML. The value space of string is the set of finite sequences of UCS characters ([ISO 10646] and [Unicode]). A UCS character (or just character, for short) is an atomic unit of communication; it is not further specified except to note that every UCS character has a corresponding UCS code point, which is an integer. The ordered property of string is the [Unicode] character number sequence

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Martin Duerst [mailto:duerst@w3.org]
> Sent: Monday, May 31, 2004 1:07 AM
> To: Neil Goldman; www-rdf-rules@w3.org
> Cc: Neil Goldman
> Subject: Re: SWRL string builtins -- suggestion
> 
> 
> This may be a bad idea. In English, a lot of functions on strings
> can be implemented by using functions on individual characters of
> the string. So a 'charAt' function seems very tempting. But in
> many other languages, things are not as simple as that. Of course
> this depends on the operation and the language.
> 
> Regards,    Martin.
> 
> At 16:45 04/05/28 -0700, Neil Goldman wrote:
> 
> >I believe the string builtins should provide a means to get to an 
> >individual character, not just to a string of length 1.
> >It would suffice to provide:
> >
> >swrlb:charAt
> >Satisfied iff the first argument is equal to the character 
> code of the 
> >character in the string second argument appearing at index 
> third argument
> >
> >=====================
> >
> >Neil Goldman              Tel:   (310)578-5350 x204
> >Teknowledge Corporation   Fax:   (310)578-5710
> >Suite 1010
> >4640 Admiralty Way
> >Marina del Rey, CA 90292
> 
> 
>

Received on Wednesday, 2 June 2004 21:00:55 UTC