RE: referendum on httpRange-14 (was RE: "information resource")

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ext Tim Berners-Lee [mailto:timbl@w3.org]
> Sent: 28 October, 2004 01:06
> To: Stickler Patrick (Nokia-TP-MSW/Tampere)
> Cc: www-tag@w3.org; sandro@w3.org; Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM
> Subject: Re: referendum on httpRange-14 (was RE: "information 
> resource")
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Oct 20, 2004, at 2:37, <Patrick.Stickler@nokia.com> wrote:
> 
> > The problem, of course, with trying to define properties of the URI
> > is that you *can't* make any statements about the URI. E.g. the
> > following is invalid RDF:
> >
> >    "http://example.com/foo"^^xsd:anyURI rdf:type 
> <ex:ResolvableURI> .
> >
> > since, of course, literals can't be subjects. I tried to get
> > typed literals allowed as subjects, since (a) they were new 
> constructs,
> > so it was not as drastic a change as allowing *any* literal to be
> > a subject, and (b) they had very specific semantics, but no go.
> 
> I agree that the restriction on URIs in the subject in RDF is 
> a mistake.
> I forgot what happened to that comment process wise.

Allowing literals as subject came up numerous times in the WG during the 
process of updating the RDF specs, both in conjunction with the work on
datatyping and separately, and each time, was voted to be too great a 
change.

> It is allowed in full N3, and I use it  often in practice.

Literals as subjects are also allowed in TriX.

It is also possible to devise a URI scheme that has bidirectional
mapping to/from typed literals. E.g.

   "val:(" DATATYPE_URI ")" LEXICAL_FORM

   where DATATYPE_URI and LEXICAL_FORM are URL-encoded.

E.g.

   <val:(http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Ew3%2Eorg%2F2001%2FXMLSchema%23lang)en>
      owl:sameAs "en"^^http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#lang ;
      rdfs:label "English" .

etc.

Who knows, though, when the process for officially adding such improvements
to RDF, such as typed literal subjects, would begin...

Patrick

Received on Thursday, 28 October 2004 08:39:52 UTC