RDF-ISSUE-13 (RDF XMLLiterals): Review RDF XML Literals [Cleanup tasks]

RDF-ISSUE-13 (RDF XMLLiterals): Review RDF XML Literals [Cleanup tasks]

http://www.w3.org/2011/rdf-wg/track/issues/13

Raised by: Andy Seaborne
On product: Cleanup tasks

RDF Concepts:
http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-concepts/#section-XMLLiteral

RDF Syntax:
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-rdf-syntax/#section-Syntax-XML-literals

The lexical space of RDF XML Literals is XML fragments which are required to be "exclusive canonical XML".  The lexical space and the value space are in 1-1 correspondence. The rules are quite complicated. These rules for canonicalization apply to the lexical form; equality testing can be done using string compare.

Canonicalization rules include no use of <tag/> and that attributes must be in sorted order (this is not an exhaustive list).

A consequence of this is that many correct XML fragments are not legal as XML Literals because they do not correspond to exclusive canonicalization.

Possible cleanup includes partially relaxing the lexical space restrictions while retaining the value space so that fragments can be used as XML literals without complex processing.

RDF XML Literals are the only datatype hard wired into RDF.

If a Turtle document is to be validated, will that require access to an XML parser and canonicalization engine?

Received on Monday, 7 March 2011 13:25:04 UTC