Issue name: 006-Editorial-Syntax

Editorial comments about syntax section

Raised by:
Massimo Marchiori
Raised on:
2002-09-04
Raised in message:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-comments/2002JulSep/0165.html
Target document section reference(s):
http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-rdf-concepts-20020829/#section-Graph-syntax
Status:
Closed
Last updated:
2002-11-18
Owner:
Jeremy Carroll

Details

*** Section 3.2

> Two RDF literals are equal if and only if they are either both XML
> literals and equal or both string literals and equal.
This def is superfluous, and can be cleared out.

*** Sections 3.2.1 and 3.2.2

These defs don't work, because they give in the ADM that XML literals
overlap with RDF literals. This ambiguity was a problem already implicitly
present in the old RDF spec, and never really clarified so far. You need to
make the ADM more fine-grained, and extend their ADM representations
with a flag or so, to make these two sets disjoint (but see also the
next issue).


*** Section 3.2.2
This is a more higher-level issue on XML literals: do we really need to
have them at the ADM data model level? With the ongoing work on data
types, wouldn't it be better to just have string literals as the only
basic datatype here?
I see this is already somehow mentioned in 2.2.5:
> [[[Review this on resolution of datatypes issues]]]
and I would favor to drop them if possible, and just use a generic datatyping
mechanism (otherwhise, the basic ADM gets more complex (as seen above), and risks
to unnecessarily complicate the datatyping mechanism. Anyway, yes, this is
dependant on the final resolution on datatyping.


*** Sections 3.3, 3.4 and 3.5

> A tidy set of nodes is one in which no two nodes have equal labels. A tidy
> set of nodes may have any number of distinct blank nodes
Mmm, do we need to introduce the "tidy" concept (as a name)? It's not
really needed (there are not "untidy" sets used in RDF), and it gives a
longer and more complex def.

So, suggestion: just define the RDF graph in its shortest and simplest way:

: B is an infinite set disjoint from (RDF-Lits U URI-refs)
: An RDF-triple belongs to ((URI-refs U B),URI-refs,(URI-refs U B U RDF-Lits))
: An RDF Graph is a set of RDF-triples.

(note: I'd even say a *finite* set of RDF-triples, but if nobody else cares,
I'm fine with the more general, "non-always-computable" def).


*** Section 3.6

> Two RDF graphs are equal if and only if they are isomorphic
We just need the notion of "isomorphism", so this should be deleted, and
the section renamed accordingly with "3.6 Graph Isomorphism"
(there's no real use to have two names for the same thing).

History

2002-09-04: Raised

See: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-comments/2002JulSep/0165.html

Various concerns with definition of abstract graph syntax.

2002-09-10: Assigned

[GK] Concerns clearly with JJC's text.

2002-11-18: Closed

See: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-comments/2002OctDec/0127.html

Citation is Jeremy's response.