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In the following snippet of RDFa:

<span about="example.com/subjectURI" rel="example.com/predicateURI" property="literalText"></span>

the URI in the about= attribute is the subject (OK the entity referred to by the URI, but you get the idea), rel indicates the predicate and property indicates a literal object. I know that using the rev attribute for the predicate reverses the subject and the object so that about= now refers to the object of the RDF statement. However, from what I have read, it doesn't seem that literals are allowed to be subjects. So, would the following be legal?

<span about="example.com/objectURI" rev="example.com/predicateURI" property="literal-text-as-a-subject"></span>

Now one could argue that literal text could be a subject of a statement. For instance Steven Colbert may write the following line of RDFa:

<span about="www.stevencolbert.com/verytruthy" rev="www.stevencolbert.com/truthyness" property="Only geeks would care about whether one could use @rev with @property, whatever the hell that means."></span>
GrantRobertson
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1 Answers1

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In answer to your specific question: yes, it is legal. Is it useful? Rarely (if ever), and it doesn't do what you are thinking.

From your examples there is some confusion:

Firstly (minor) you're not using absolute URIs. My assumption is that you mean http://example.com/subjectURI rather than example.com/subjectURI etc, but they're not the same thing.

Secondly you're using property="literalText". My guess is that's a conflation of property and content. What you want is something like:

<html xmlns:ns="http://example.com/">
...
<span about="http://example.com/subjectURI" 
      property="ns:predicateURI"
      content="literalText"></span>

Which results in:

<http://example.com/subjectURI> <http://example.com/predicateURI> "literalText" .

Or with the equivalent result (assuming xmlns):

<span about="http://example.com/subjectURI" 
      property="ns:predicateURI">literalText</span>

rel and rev are used to relate two URIs, not URIs to literals; that's what property does. And since there's no inverse of property you can't make a literal subject.

user205512
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  • You are correct in all your assumptions as to my post. I was just using shorthand AND I hadn't quite grokked that the http:// is required to make the URI absolute. I also did conflate property and content. I have it all in a diagram on my whiteboard, big as life, but looking at it at an angle hosed me up as I was writing the message. So, literals are always and only objects, even if that literal is between the start and end tags containing the subject and predicate. Thanks – GrantRobertson Feb 21 '12 at 02:30