Hi Yves,
[trimmed cc list]
On 2 Jul 2010, at 11:15, Yves Raimond wrote:
I am not arguing for each vendor to implement that. I am arguing for
removing this arbitrary limitation from the RDF spec. Also marked as
an issue since 2000:
http://www.w3.org/2000/03/rdf-tracking/#rdfms-literalsubjects
The demand that W3C modify the specs to allow literals as subjects
should be rejected on a simple principle: Those who demand that
change, including yourself, have failed to put their money where their
mouth is. Where is the alternative specification that documents the
syntactic and semantic extension? Where are the proposed "RDF/XML++"
and "RDFa++" that support literals as subjects? Where are the patches
to Jena, Sesame, Redland and ARC2 that support these changes?
The restriction seems to bother some people enough that they write
noisy emails, but it apparently doesn't bother them enough to actually
do anything about it.
W3C's job should be to broker compromises between non-interoperable
approaches by different vendors, and to foster adoption by putting its
stamp of approval on already widely deployed technologies developed by
the community. You know, the kind of stuff that actually came out near
the top of the RDF Next Steps work item poll [1]: named graphs,
Turtle, RDF/JSON.
Someone mentioned HTML 3.2 in this thread. Let me mention the ill-
fated XHTML 2.0. A group of markup purists who were more interested in
polishing the arcane details of the language, rather than meeting the
interests of the heaviest users and the vendors. They did an enormous
disservice to W3C and the web. The users and vendors turned their back
on W3C, started their own effort, and W3C ultimately had to abandon
XHTML 2.0 or risk to become irrelevant to the future of HTML.
Literals as subjects feels very much like an XHTML 2.0 kind of feature
to me.
Or, coming at it from a completely different direction: I have yet to
meet a person (except Nathan perhaps) who says, "Yeah that RDF stuff,
I had a look at it but then saw that it does not support literals as
subjects, so I gave up on it."
Best,
Richard
[1] http://www.w3.org/2010/06/rdf-work-items/table
That aside, I don't see your point about extra hardware. There is, in
my experience, no substantial difference between storing
<#me> foaf:name "Ivan" and "Ivan" :name_of <#me>.
_not_enough_unique_ to interlink data.
There are. Their value is their identity. They are *perfectly* unique.
"cat" is uniquely identifying the string made of c, a and t. From your
previous email, I suppose you're concerned about rounding for floats
and doubles, is that it? If so, whatever you write as their rounded
value is their identity (and we can't write "Pi"^^xsd:real afaik :) ).
[ ] str:double_metaphone_word "Acton" ; str:double_metaphone "AKTN" .
and
[ ] str:soundex_word "Smith" ; str:soundex "S530" .
I agree this is another way to model it, and Jeremy suggested it as
well. But it creates a level of indirection and, from a modeling point
of view, does look very weird. If you were to extend that model to,
say, "1" list:in (1 2 3), that would look very nasty...
Best,
y
are at least protected from collisions and allow more properties to
be added in a safe way.
Best Regards,
Ivan Mikhailov
OpenLink Software
http://virtuoso.openlinksw.com