Re: ISSUE-26 (dct:language range): Range of dcterms:language is a resource, not literal [DCAT]

On 9 Feb 2012, at 13:26, Government Linked Data Working Group Issue Tracker wrote:
> ISSUE-26 (dct:language range): Range of dcterms:language is a resource, not literal [DCAT]
> 
> http://www.w3.org/2011/gld/track/issues/26
> 
> Raised by: Phil Archer
> On product: DCAT
> 
> DCAT uses dcterms:language as a property of dcat:Catalog and dcat:Dataset. In both cases we state that the range is:
> 
> "rdfs:Literal a string representing the code of the language as described in http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3066.txt"
> 
> This is incorrect according to the DC spec which gives the range as http://purl.org/dc/terms/LinguisticSystem - i.e. a resource.

This doesn't follow. Everything in RDF is a resource. Strings are resources too. See here:
http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/rdf/raw-file/default/rdf-concepts/index.html#dfn-resource

And AFAIK, dct:LinguisticSystem could be a datatype.

> We have a number of options:
> - create a subproperty and define its range as being a literal;
> - identify a set of URIs that end with the RFC3066 codes (analogous to http://dbpedia.org/page/ISO_3166-2:XX for countries);
> - create such a set (this could be seen as being very useful by others!);
> - stop worrying and just use a literal and have done with it.

I think this was discussed before. My recommendation would be to use an xsd:language typed literal. That's explicit, and doesn't require minting language URIs.

Best,
Richard

Received on Thursday, 9 February 2012 14:38:14 UTC