Re: datatypes and RDF Schema

From: Peter F. Patel-Schneider ([email protected])
Date: 10/08/01


From: Pat Hayes <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: datatypes and RDF Schema
Date: Mon, 8 Oct 2001 11:06:16 -0500

[... ...]

> >>  >3/ Use special URIs to refer to these value spaces and incorporate their
> >  > >    meaning into the meaning of RDF Schema.
> >>
> >>  How does this differ from the proposal that Patrick Stickler has been
> >>  outlining on rdf-logic?
> >
> >Patrick wants, I think, int:20 to be the way you get the integer 20.  This
> >proposal does not use qualified literals at all.
> 
> If I follow Patrick, neither does he. He wants to eliminate literals 
> altogether and replace them with typed Qnames.

Which I view as exactly the same as typed literals.  :-)  

I don't care too much whether typed literals are lexicalized as

	<age>int:20</age>

or

	<age type=int>20</age>


> >Instead it uses something
> >like xsd:integer to get from the vague notion of 20 to the precise notion
> >of the integer 20.
> 
> Yawn. Frankly, I personally don't have an axe to grind here. What I 
> do care about is that some fast, simple, piece of machinery can 
> determine what the 'type' of any literal is supposed to be 
> sufficiently tightly that I can assign it a unique value in any 
> interpretation. It has to be fast and simple enough to be thought of 
> as part of the lexical/parsing machinery, not part of the general 
> inference process.

The point of discussion is, I think, how much work it is to determine that
a mention of 20 has ``type'' xsd:integer.  I'm arguing that there can be
benefits to having a heavy-weight (i.e., semantic), but special-purpose
mechanism.  I think that you are arguing that to make sense, the
special-purpose mechanism has to be light-weight (i.e., syntactic).

> Pat

peter


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