Abstract
This work introduces the notion of descriptive typing. Type systems are typically prescriptive in the sense that they prescribe a space of permitted programs. In contrast, descriptive types assigned to resources in Linked Data provide useful annotations that describe how a resource may be used. Resources are represented by URIs that have no internal structure, hence there is no a priori type for a resource. Instead of raising compile time errors, a descriptive type system raises runtime warnings with a menu of options that make suggestions to the programmer. We introduce a subtype system, algorithmic type system and operational semantics that work together to characterise how descriptive types are used. The type system enables RDF Schema inference and several other modes of inference that are new to Linked Data.
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Notes
- 1.
The idea of descriptive types arose in joint work with Giuseppe Castagna and Giorgio Ghelli. Here we instantiate it for our Linked Data scripting language [6]. The development of descriptive types for the full SPARQL 1.1 specification will be given in a forthcoming paper by the above authors.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the organisers of the Ershov memorial conference, PSI 2014, for inviting this work to be presented as a keynote speech. The work of the first and second authors was supported by a grant of the Romanian National Authority for Scientific Research, project number PN-II-ID-PCE-2011-3-0919.
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Ciobanu, G., Horne, R., Sassone, V. (2015). Descriptive Types for Linked Data Resources. In: Voronkov, A., Virbitskaite, I. (eds) Perspectives of System Informatics. PSI 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8974. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-46823-4_1
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