Re: [humanmarkup-comment] Referents

["Emmanuil Batsis (Manos)" <mbatsis@humanmarkup.org>]

Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:

>The value of a referent is likely to be 
>
><!ELEMENT referent (URI | (some set of element names)+) >
><!ATTRIBUTE referent
>   rdf:id  #REQUIRED >
>
>or something like that.  I put the 
>URI there because it might be useful to point 
>to something uniquely, or to use a unique 
>URI as the proxy name.
>
>Ok, Manos.  How much trouble did this start? :-)
>

The only trouble is me; I don't speak DTDs ;-). But from what I can see 
and the RDF-friendly approach we are trying to work out the above goes 
towards

<referent rdf:id="rdfid1">
   <uri>http://www.mydomain.com/some/dir</uri>
</referent>

minimized as

<referent rdf:id="rdfid1" uri="http://www.mydomain.com/some/dir"; />

What bother me is the child elements I don't know about; that's what 
this RDF-friendly approach is all about. We will have to ensure that 
child elements map both syntactically and logically into RDF predicates 
(properties), having the referent as a subject, while also fitting the 
simple XML viewpoint.

Also, we may want to use rdf:about instead of rdf:id to specify we are 
talking about a certain resource instead of something that currently is 
in memory under the id reference.

Some people may dissagree but I would like every element and attribute 
node to be qualified and default namespaces to be avoided. What do you 
think?

Anyway, here is the RDF friendly version (i made up the HumanML namespace:

<huml:referent rdf:ID="rdfid1">
    <huml:uri rdf:resource="http://www.mydomain.com/some/dir"/>
</huml:referent>

This produces the following two triples:

<#rdfid1> <rdf:type> <huml:referent> .
<#rdfid1> <huml:uri> <http://www.mydomain.com/some/dir> .


You have probably noted the rdf:resource attribute, I included it so 
that we can be able to view the uri value as a resource under RDF. If we 
just want literals, we can convert the above to:

<huml:referent rdf:ID="rdfid1"
  huml:uri="http://www.mydomain.com/some/dir"/>

The triples now are

<#rdfid1> <rdf:type> <huml:referent> .
<#rdfid1> <huml:uri> "http://www.mydomain.com/some/dir"; .

The only difference is the literal view of the uri object. Personally, I would urge you folks to favour against literals, as they are more or less useless under RDF. You cannot use them as subjects so you can't say anything about them.

For people that don't know what is going on, Len had the idea to combine our markup design with RDF, so that people can use it either as vanilla XML or RDF; personally I like the idea, although we are still trying to erase the rough edges. This means that one will be able to use either a simple XML parser or an RDF processor to process our markup. It may also mean that we may be able to use both XML Schema languages and RDF Schema for the same format.

How does all this looks? 

Cheers,

MAnos