David Booth wrote:
I agree, but at the W3C RDF Next Steps workshop over the weekend, I was
surprised to find that there was substantial sentiment *against* having
literals as subjects. A straw poll showed that of those at the
workshop, this is how people felt about having an RDF working group
charter include literals as subjects:
http://www.w3.org/2010/06/28-rdfn-minutes.html
Charter MUST include: 0
Charter SHOULD include: 1
Charter MAY include: 6
Charter MUST NOT include: 12
I was one of the "MUST NOT"s to my surprise.
Here are the reasons I voted this way:
- it will mess up RDF/XML
- RDF/XML is horrid but we had consensus that it was unfixable - i.e. we
need to live with it.
- however little work the WG does is too much in terms of the real
obstacles to SW success (following Dan from
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/2010Mar/0196.html
[[
What I feel is
missing (despite the *millions*) that has been thrown at the Semantic
Web brand, is the boring slog of getting the base tools and software
polished.
]]
). In particular my view is that literals as subjects is not part of the
problem to be solved.
- this is a purists' desire not a practical obstacle. No value-adding
argument made for a change of this magnitude. It's a bug. Fixing it may
cost $0.5M to $1M say, maybe more. I don't see that much return.
Jeremy
