Errata in RDF

This document records errata and corrections suggested by the community in the RDF specification as published on the 10 February 2004:

These corrections have no normative status as they have not been incorporated in the specification through the Recommendation Track process. Ivan Herman, Semantic Web Activity lead, is the editor of this document. Note that the RDF Core WG has closed; there may be issues relating to the RDF specifications which are not currently listed here. If you find something in one of the documents listed above that you believe may be an error and wish to have it recorded here, please post your discovery to the www-rdf-comments mailing list. After posting to the list, please send a pointer to the archived copy of your message to the editor of this document, Ivan Herman.

The errata are separated into six sections, corresponding to the six parts of the specification.

Three kinds of changes are highlighted: ↑new, added text↑, ↑changed text↑, and ↓deleted text↓.

Errata for RDF Primer

Errata for RDF Concepts

Errata for RDF Syntax

[datatyped-empty-literals]

Serialization of datatyped empty literals is not anticipated by the RDF/XML grammar.

This is believed by several developers and former WG-members to be an omission in the grammar defined by the RDF/XML Syntax Specification: a bug was reported (and acknowledged by the editor), relating to the use of an rdf:datatype attribute on empty RDF properties. See the archived mailing list thread for technical details. In addition to the question of the RDF/XML grammar's syntactic completeness, note that this issue identifies a construct that occurs within RDF graphs that cannot be serialized in the RDF/XML syntax.

[incorrect-resolve]

Incorrect resolve(...) Calls

Section 6 of the RDF/XML Syntax Specification (Revised) says that the parent property of the element information item in the XML Infoset is required, but section 6.1.2 Element Event does not create a parent accessor for that event.

Element events therefore do not have a parent accessor, and yet a parent accessor on element events is made use of in a number or sections. See the error submission for further details.

[missing-parent-accessor]

Missing Parent Accessor

Section 6.3.3 Grammar Action Notation of the RDF/XML Syntax Specification defines the resolve action with the signature resolve(e, s), i.e. taking two arguments, and yet we find the following:

u:=uri(identifier:=resolve(a.string-value))
- 7.2.11 Production nodeElement

u:=uri(identifier:=resolve(a.string-value))
- 7.2.21 Production emptyPropertyElt

Which is a bug. I believe that both of these should read:

u:=uri(identifier:=resolve(e, a.string-value))

See the error submission

[syntax-typo-tiple]

Syntax typo “tiple”

"and the following tipletriple is added to the graph" (in 7.2.11 Production nodeElement)

See the error submission

Errata for RDF Semantics

The following text, in Paragraph #13 of Section 5.1 of the document:

If D is a datatype map, a D-interpretation of a vocabulary V is any rdfs-interpretation I of V union {aaa: < aaa, x > in D for some x } which satisfies the following extra conditions for every pair < aaa, x > in D:

should be replaced by:

If D is a datatype map, a D-interpretation of a vocabulary V is any rdfs-interpretation I of V union {aaa: < aaa, x > in D for some x } union { "sss"^^aaa : < aaa, x > in D for some x and "sss" in the lexical space of x } which satisfies the following extra conditions for every pair < aaa, x > in D:

See the error report on the mailing list for further technical details.

Errata for RDF Vocabulary

Errata for RDF Test Cases

[n-triple-grammar-ambiguity]

The N-Triples Grammar is Ambiguous

According to the N-Triples grammar, the following is a valid instance of the line production in an N-Triples document:

<p:> <> <q:> <> <r:> <> "s" .

But which part of the line matches the subject production, and which part matches the predicate production? See the error submission for further details.

RDF Errata