Re: ISSUE-12 On languages and datatypes

I'm not advocating the use of datatypes for language tags because I 
think it's not the best solution, but...

Le 11/06/2011 19:11, Andy Seaborne a écrit :
>
>
> 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 is a datatype-for-language would be fully defined by the RDF spec. 
That is, we would not have to deconstruct the URI rdf:lang-fr to know 
it's the lang tag "fr" because the spec would tell you that the URI 
rdf:lang-fr denotes the set of pairs {(sss,"fr") | sss \in String}. Just 
like you don't have to deconstruct the URI rdf:_1337 to understand that 
it is a container membership property, even if rdf:_1337 is not 
explicitly mentioned in the spec.

> What if it is later found that:
>
> ex:xyz owl:sameAs rdflang:lang-en .

The same that happens when we found that:

ex:xyz owl:sameAs xsd:string .

that is, nothing, as far as RDF is concerned.


> 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.

It helps as much as language tags can help. I don't see how it is in any 
way a counter argument to datatypes-for-languages.


Regards,
-- 
Antoine Zimmermann
Researcher at:
Laboratoire d'InfoRmatique en Image et Systèmes d'information
Database Group
7 Avenue Jean Capelle
69621 Villeurbanne Cedex
France
Tel: +33(0)4 72 43 61 74 - Fax: +33(0)4 72 43 87 13
Lecturer at:
Institut National des Sciences Appliquées de Lyon
20 Avenue Albert Einstein
69621 Villeurbanne Cedex
France
antoine.zimmermann@insa-lyon.fr
http://zimmer.aprilfoolsreview.com/

Received on Friday, 17 June 2011 09:33:18 UTC