From: Dan Brickley (Daniel.Brickley@bristol.ac.uk)
Date: 03/01/01
JC, This is a followup to some hallway and lunchtable conversations about DAML datatyping and the work of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. My understanding of the forthcoming revision of DAML+OIL+DT(*) is that we say all properties are either of the kind that point to resources, or of the kind that point to concrete datatypes, strings structured as per XML Schema part 2. If this means previous deployed apps such as Dublin Core, RSS, Mozilla (Netscape 6), Open Directory and others will be broken because they allow some properties to point both to resources and literals, I'm worried. For example, an emerging practice in the DC world is to use the relation http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/creator to either point to a string (the creators name) or to a (typically un-named) resource which stands for the creator as a person. Applications have the type (Literal vs Resource) available to them so can draw different inferences if they see a string than if they see a name. Since DAML+OIL+DT is being seen by many as being groomed for an 'RDF 2'-ish role, I'm seeing understandable concern from RDF 1.0 adopters that their work is at risk of being depracated. I haven't followed all the DAML discussions about XMLS datatypes in RDF (though have had some related discussions with XML folk lately); if someone could advise on the current situation and future plans I'd be very grateful. I should also mention that the incorporation of XML Schema datatypes into RDF is on the charter of the forthcoming RDFCore WG, so coming to a common understanding of the tradeoffs here is increasingly important. Discussion summaries that I could point the Dublin Core community at would be particularly valuable. Thanks for any clarifications, Dan (RDFCore WG co-chair; DCMI-Architecture co-chair; RDFS editor... sigh ;-) (*) an anagram of TIDAL MOLD, fwiw.
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