Best Practice: Use of RDF data types

State: Draft

Contact: Nick Crossley

Scope

This Best Practice recommends appropriate usage of RDF data types, and considers the implications for query writers.

Discussion

• An untyped literal (in Turtle, a literal in quotes) is the same as xsd:string
• In Turtle, unquoted literals have an implicit type - true is the same as "'true"^^xsd:boolean, 42 is the same as "42"^^xsd:int, etc.
• Comparison of typed literals varies between SPARQL implementations
  • xsd literals and type hierarchy
  • user-defined types extending xsd literals
  • other user-defined types
• Types used by OSLC
• Jena performs very strict validation of the contents of literals with type XMLLiteral

Recommendation

TBD

Examples

TBD

  Example 1

See Also

• RDF 1.1 Concepts and Abstract Syntax - Datatypes
• XML Schema Part 2: Datatypes Second Edition
• XML Schema Datatypes in RDF and OWL
• Apache Jena - Typed literals how-to
• RDF Literal Data Types in Practice