xmlns, uri+name pairs or just uris..? Clarification needed. from Jan Grant on 2000-07-22 (www-rdf-interest@w3.org from July 2000) (original) (raw)

Excuse me for zoning in on this a bit late, but what exactly is the state of play regarding namespaces in RDF?

As I understand it, an xmlns-qualified name is a pair of (namespace URI, name); there is no composition function implied apart from the trivial "shove both bits into a pair".

But RDF claims that resources are (or are identified by) URIs only; there seems to be an (implicit? explicit?) composition function that takes the namespace and the name part and produces a URI from them.

Can someone please clear this up for me once and for all?

jan

PS. Obviously a pair of (nsuri, name) can be uniquely mapped onto a URI using some cheesy hack like inventing a URI scheme like

nselement:[nsuri]name

but there's probably a better way to do this.

-- jan grant, ILRT, University of Bristol. http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/ Tel +44(0)117 9287163 Fax +44 (0)117 9287112 RFC822 jan.grant@bris.ac.uk HP-unix: Open Sauce product, available in 57 distributions.

Received on Saturday, 22 July 2000 07:53:04 UTC