Re: ISSUE-12 On languages and datatypes

On 09/06/11 10:00, Jan Wielemaker wrote:
>
> Mapping @<lang> to rdflang:<lang> does (IMHO) make handling (un)typed
> and language classified literals a lot more more straightforward.
>
>      --- Jan

Originaly, I was in favour of datatypes for languages but two points 
caused me to change my mind.  Datatyping does not seem to add anything 
but does make text harder to work with.

1/ You have to either have to deconstruct the URI string or dereference 
the URI to get the language:

"foo"^^ex:xyz .

is what language?  RFC 5046 is about a common set of names for languages 
and it exists now.

What if it is later found that:

   ex:xyz owl:sameAs rdflang:lang-en .

2/ Language tags are indications of what to display to people, not the 
"value" so datatyping at the language level does not help very much:

   "à la carte"@en

makes perfect sense in English.

 Andy

Received on Saturday, 11 June 2011 17:11:48 UTC