Re: getting language tags out of the fundamental model (ISSUE-12)

On May 31, 2011, at 11:23 AM, Jeremy Carroll wrote:

> On 5/31/2011 8:54 AM, David Wood wrote:
>> On May 31, 2011, at 10:56, Jeremy Carroll wrote:
>> 
>>> On 5/31/2011 7:17 AM, Sandro Hawke wrote:
>>>> In other words, we could say "foo"@bar is syntactic sugar for something
>>>> like [ a rdf:LinguisticExpression; rdf:language "bar"; rdf:value "foo"].
>>>> I know that doesn't address everything, but it has pretty much the same
>>>> problems everything else does being modeled in RDF.  :-)
>>> That was a design considered and rejected by the previous group. Personally I prefer it; but I don't think we should reopen that can of worms.
>> 
>> At the risk of being difficult, why not?
> 
> We have a standard - we have interoperability - it might not be perfect - it never is (at least in somebody's book); for me the lang tag stuff is not perfect - but the amount of benefit from a major reworking is not worth the interoperability cost
> 

A few other bad things about that design. 

1. It replaces a single literal with two triples and a blank node, or else requires inventing a URI. For users who routinely tag text with languages, this is a real burden.

2. It allows pathological RDF such as 
[ a rdf:LingExp; rdf:lang "en", rdf:lang "fr" ]

3. It allows missing information, such as 
[ a rdf:LingExp; rdf:value "chat" ]
[ b rdf:LIngExp; rdf:lang "en" ]

I'm sure I can think of some more by tomorrow.

Pat


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Received on Wednesday, 1 June 2011 05:44:47 UTC