Re: update on I18N review of RDF, OWL

On Mon, 2003-06-16 at 17:39, Martin Duerst wrote:
> Hello Dan,
> 
> Many thanks for contacting me on this.
> Please see below for my take on your assumptions.
> I have copied the I18N IG list, used for technical
> discussions.
> 
> At 13:47 03/06/11 -0500, Dan Connolly wrote:
> >Further to my action to get confirmation from I18N WG
> >that our last call spec is I18N-happy...
> >
> >I talked with Martin in Budapest a couple weeks ago.
> >
> >Since then, he collected his thoughts on RDF literals
> >and such...
> >
> >Summary of strings, markup, and language tagging in RDF (resend) Martin
> >Duerst (Thu, Jun 05 2003)
> >http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-rdfcore-wg/2003Jun/0023.html
> >
> >and the RDF Core WG is working thru them.
> 
> Yes, this is very important for I18N. It's not only my
> thoughts, it has been confirmed by the WG.
> 
> 
> >I'm still reasonably confident that OWL doesn't introduce
> >any I18N issues; that if RDF Core satisfies the I18N WG
> >(without making changes that we don't like) then I18N WG
> >will be happy with OWL too.
> 
> I very much hope that the RDF Core WG will do this, but
> there are some dependencies. See for example Graham Klyne's
> mail at
> http://www.w3.org/mid/5.1.0.14.2.20030606130832.02f79ee8@127.0.0.1,
> where he mentions that RDF may treat xsd:string and plain
> literals differently, but something on top of it may treat
> them as being the same. That 'something' may well be OWL.
> 
> This ties in with the idea I mentioned in Budapest to have
> some support in OWL for comparing strings/literals both
> including and excluding language information. I'm not
> completely sure OWL is the right place to do that, but
> how would I otherwise express things such as "this is
> a functional property if you don't care about the language
> of the literal". If the webont WG has thought this through,
> can you point me to the discussion?

Hm... we discussed some perhaps related things under
the datatypes issue...
  http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/WebOnt/webont-issues.html#I5.8-Datatypes
I think we talked about floating-point-equality which
isn't quite the same as identity... but we didn't
take the idea very seriously.

>  If not, we should make
> sure we have had this discussion so that we don't regret
> a missed opportunity later.

Hmm... I don't know how to make sure that we will.
I already regret all the missed opportunities since
around July 2002 when our specs first became available
for review.

> Also, you mentioned that you wanted to check with us whether
> we would be okay with the requirements (or, in some case,
> non-requirements) that OWL had on supporting XML literals
> and XSD datatypes. Can you tell me where in which spec
> I can find the details?

The specific required datatypes are documented here...

"OWL tools need only implement the datatypes xsd:integer and
xsd:string."
 --
http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-semantics/syntax.html#owl_built_in_datatypes

It relies on an understanding of how the whole formalism
of RDF and OWL is parameterized by a set of datatypes.
If you're not familiar with that, the details are in...
http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/WD-rdf-mt-20030123/#dtype_interp

> 
> 
> Regards,     Martin.
> 
> 
> >Martin, if you could confirm, tentatively, that would help.
> >Or should we expect specific review comments on the OWL
> >specs from the I18N WG?

-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/

Received on Thursday, 26 June 2003 10:40:37 UTC