Hi!
Technically, the main purpose of having a separate
datatype was to explicity
model values that identify a resource (in the RDF sense, where resource means
"anything that can be identified unambiguously"), so we can apply mappings
(e.g.
to URIs and URLs) when exporting and displaying them.
We need also to be careful here as we have some external ID-like types
that do not translate to URIs. So we should either not convert them to
that type, or we'd have complex logic of which type the corresponding
properties should be (since we should tell whether this property uses
string or URI, and we should be able to do it automatically when
generating RDF).
Right now I'd suggest not converting such properties, unless there's a
good reason to.
--
Stas Malyshev
smalyshev(a)wikimedia.org