Re: RDF's curious literals (was: Re: RDFON: a new RDF serialization)

On 31 Jul 2007, at 23:44, Garret Wilson wrote:

>
> The other is literals. Before replying to your comments below, let  
> me just step back and make a few observations and ask a few  
> questions concerning literals in RDF. (By the way, when I say  
> "you", please understand that I'm speaking to a hypothetical  
> responder or the general RDF user, not necessarily you (Tim), or  
> anyone else.)
>
> 1. How is a literal any different than a resource?

I think the point of Tim's post was that really he thinks that the  
only things that are literals are strings.

[] xsd:integer "123" .

can be written in shorthand as

"123"^xsd:integer .

(see the N3 tutorial)

Because everybody in the xml world was going crazy about xsd  
datatypes they wanted this more complex notion of literals. To  
satisfy them the ^^ notation was added.

123 = "123"^^xsd:integer,
       "123"^xsd:integer
       123 .

is a nice shortcut in N3.

> The RDFS definition at http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-schema/#ch_literal  
> is at first circular ("the class of literal values") and then  
> nonexistent for some literals ("This specification does not define  
> the class of plain literals."). The RDF Primer explanation at  
> http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-concepts/#section-Literals is more  
> helpful: A literal is a resource identified by a lexical  
> representation, which representation may be "more convenient or  
> intuitive" to use instead of a URI.
>
> So at the end of the day, a literal is simply a resource that is  
> easy to refer to using a string of characters. That's all well and  
> good, but why should that affect my model? Why is a resource an  
> instance of another class (rdfs:Literal) just because I like to  
> identify it by a lexical representation?
>

You may have a good point there. There is a difference between a  
string and a URI though that is worth keeping in mind. Namely you  
have to look at the world to find out if the following is true or false

<uri1> = <uri2> .

where uri1 and uri2 are two different strings.

But you don't need to look at the world to tell that the following is  
false

"uri1" = "uri2" .

you know they are different just by doing a character by character  
comparison.

Now you may say that really that's just because they are a list of  
characters, and you could refer to each character as a URI, and then  
well your point would stand. So you could have something like

( <http://unicode.org/char/u> <http://unicode.org/char/r> <http:// 
unicode.org/char/i> <http://unicode.org/char/1> ) = ( <http:// 
unicode.org/char/u> <http://unicode.org/char/r> <http://unicode.org/ 
char/i> <http://unicode.org/char/2> ) .

There you would have to know something about the referents of each of  
these characters to tell that it can't be true.

Still it is convenient to have literals, you have to admit. Because  
when you see one, you know how to deal with it immediately. And we  
are engineers, so we do like to have some conveniences.

> Take for example the resource identified by the URI <http:// 
> example.org/presidents/GeorgeWBush>. This resource may have an  
> rdf:type of foaf:Person. (I could assert all sorts of other RDF  
> statements about this resource, but will decline to do so at this  
> time.) Is this resource an instance of the class rdfs:Literal? No?  
> Why not?
>
> But wait---if I decide that it's easier to represent this resource  
> using a string, I could create the resource "George W.  
> Bush"^^foaf:Person.

Please have a closer look at N3, or else we will keep repeating the  
same points. Tim BL would say that
the above is more clearly stated as:

"George W. Bush"^foaf:Person .

which is

[] foaf:Person "George W. Bush" .

And as you can see that is not what you meant. foaf:Person is a class  
and not a relation.
(think of relations as arrows going between things as depicted here
http://blogs.sun.com/bblfish/resource/Syntax-Semantics-Photo.jpg )

Also to refer to people via a String is not helpful, because they can  
have different names. Since the
following is necessarily false

"George W. Bush" = "George Bush" .

you would not be able to make the assertions we all want to make. In  
RDF we think of it this way:

[] foaf:name "George W. Bush",
              "George Bush" .

That is ok. A person can have two name relations different strings.   
URIs are Universal Names.
Strings are resources too, but they refer to themselves.

That is an important and useful enough difference to make a special  
case for the semantics.


Henry

Received on Tuesday, 31 July 2007 22:43:59 UTC