[tdwg-tag] literal enumerated values in TCS-RDF

Gregor Hagedorn G.Hagedorn at BBA.DE
Mon Oct 2 15:38:07 CEST 2006


Steve writes:
>>>> However, using XML namespace prefixes in resource references inside
>>>> RDF/XML documents tends to cause problems because not all RDF/XML
>>>> parsers are smart enough to dereference the namespace prefix and  
>>>> build a fully-qualified resource URI.  A safer form of the above would be  

>>>> the fully qualified resource URI which looks like:
>>>> <tn:nomenclaturalCode  
>>>> rdf:resource="http://tdwg.org/2006/03/12/TaxonNames/botanical" />

It seems the discussion confuses QNames ("namespace-colon") and XML-Entities 
(ampersand-semicolon) - or am I confused???

An attempt to clarify: From my understanding, xml itself has no such thing as a 
namespace-colon in literals - xml-schema has introduced it as a convenient 
thing (QName). However, the use of xml-entities is a requirement of xml 1.0 
itself. I agree with Rod that URIs are correct way for RDF:

  rdf:resource="http://tdwg.org/2006/03/12/TaxonNames/botanical"

and under no circumstances (even with RDF-xml-Schema) can we use

  rdf:resource="tn:/botanical"

because RDF does not use QNames. However, we can use (if abbreviation is an 
issue, and providing an entity definition for it, as the protege examples do.)

  rdf:resource="&tn;/botanical"

If RDF-parsers fail to deal with the latter, they are grossly non-interoperable 
with xml as a whole.

Gregor----------------------------------------------------------
Gregor Hagedorn (G.Hagedorn at bba.de)
Institute for Plant Virology, Microbiology, and Biosafety
Federal Research Center for Agriculture and Forestry (BBA)
Königin-Luise-Str. 19           Tel: +49-30-8304-2220
14195 Berlin, Germany           Fax: +49-30-8304-2203




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