Re: [Gzz] Literal names in the structure

[Benja Fallenstein]

Rauli Ruohonen wrote:
> I looked at the recent RDF stuff, and while I think that it's the right
> direction to go to (it even feels almost like high time to do that ;-),
> there's one thing that bugs me with it: literal strings in places
> where they don't belong to. (or maybe I'm mistaken, I did look at it
> rather superficially.. yet, most systems still get this wrong)
>
> Anything that doesn't come with a content-type, that can't be replaced
> e.g. with a silly animated png of a bear or something, should be a
> randomly generated bit string, or otherwise complete gibberish to a human.

Literals in RDF are text string *representations* of actual values. For 
example, string "714" with datatype xsd:integer (or :int, dunno) is the 
number sevenhundredandfourteen. One could use binary, but strings make 
the serialization human-readable.

> When using Unicode, people somehow feel like it's much "safer" than ASCII,
> that anything can be plausibly written in it. But anything can be
> plausibly written in ASCII, or encoded to 0 and 1..  Unicode is not the
> be-all end-all of character encodings; there are many characters in the
> Asian languages that can not be written in it, and in some fields it
> causes a bit of a problem when people can't write the special vocabulary
> of the field as they wish to.

Yes, but Unicode goes a much longer way than ASCII. I think it's more 
culturally sensitive to have serializations in incomplete Unicode than 
plain ASCII that can encode zero Asian ideographs.

> New symbols may also appear in math etc. One
> should always be allowed to resort to using PNG etc., or better yet,
> scalable font using a non-unicode character set.

One should also be able to emphasize words. Both of these are tasks 
handled by markup languages on top of plain Unicode literals.

> There's also that everything (with URI, of course, every concept has an
> URI ;-) has many names, and more than one per language. Which one is shown
> should be determined by the user, not hard-coded anywhere, especially in a
> place that's hard to change.

RDF deals with different names in different languages. We will build our 
views so that users can change the way the label shown for a URI is 
computed. (E.g. first name/last name/full name/name (age) etc. for people.)

A-J wrote:
> The important advantage of ISO 10646 and Unicode is that they are
> extensible character sets.  New mathematical characters are created, and
> when they get significant use, they are allocated code points.  Witness
> the new characters in 3.2, for encoding Z.

Seconded.

Tuukka wrote:
> I hope all media we're going to use is xanalogical anyway and not RDF 
> literals :-)

Um, both? How would you express xanalogical media in RDF except as literals?

Of course, we won't usually show the actual string content of the 
literal (<xu:span uri="..." pos="17" len="6">foobar</xu:span>...).

Tuomas wrote:
> > I hope all media we're going to use is xanalogical anyway and not RDF 
> > > literals :-) But one idea in using RDF is that we could better collaborate 
> > > with others. That's why Loom starts as a browser to *general* RDF data, 
> > > including data that uses literals to express all terminals.
>
> I see xanalogical media here as essentially another mapping: a map from URIs
> to enfilades.

I don't understand this.

- Benja