[Versa] Issue 1, better literal and datatype support

[Uche Ogbuji]

On Fri, 2005-08-12 at 00:43 -0600, Michael Olson wrote:
> I'd like to propose adding better literal and data type support to  
> Versa.  I don't think we need to do too much to the spec itself to  
> support this.  One thing we need is a literal data type.  This would be  
> a representation of a plain (with or without language) or typed  
> literal.  I think we leave hard issues like comparison and sorting  
> between typed literals to the underlying model.  If the model support  
> D-entailment then it can properly compare "01"^^xsd:int and  
> "1"^^xsd:int.  If it doesn't....

Yeah.  That sounds like the classic Versa approach.

> Besides the addition of the literal datatype, I think all that is  
> needed is to determine how the conversions work (should be pretty  
> straight forward) and some functions.  ie. it would be nice to filter  
> on language and/or datatype in a traversal.

How the conversions work?  You don't mean conversions between data typed
literals and, say, Versa number, etc., right?

> One last thing, we would need to allow these literals as "subjects" in  
> traversals.  This does not mean much from the specification point of  
> view, maybe just a mention, but implementors will need to understand  
> this.

You mean we'd have to allow them to be the left hand side of backward
traversals?  If so, agreed.


-- 
Uche Ogbuji                               Fourthought, Inc.
http://uche.ogbuji.net                    http://fourthought.com
http://copia.ogbuji.net                   http://4Suite.org
Use CSS to display XML, part 2 - http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/edu/x-dw-x-xmlcss2-i.html
XML Output with 4Suite & Amara - http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2005/04/20/py-xml.html
Use XSLT to prepare XML for import into OpenOffice Calc - http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-oocalc/
Schema standardization for top-down semantic transparency - http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-think31.html