Re: in...of syntax Re: Turtle Last Call: Request for Review

On Wed, Jul 18, 2012 at 12:27:54PM +0100, Dan Brickley wrote:
> On 18 July 2012 10:34, Yves Raimond <Yves.Raimond@bbc.co.uk> wrote:
> > On Tue, Jul 17, 2012 at 10:42:48PM -0500, Pat Hayes wrote:
> >>
> >> On Jul 16, 2012, at 3:36 PM, Tim Berners-Lee wrote:
> >>
> >> > I would like to formalize the request I have made at intervals
> >> > to include the     is ... of syntax as in N3 in Turtle.
> >> >
> >> > Motivations:
> >> >
> >> > - It is convenient for human Turtle writers.
> >> >     Example:
> >> >
> >> >     foaf:Person is rdf:type of :Alice, :Bob, :Charlie, :David, :Elisa .
> >> >
> >> >     Example:
> >> >
> >> >     :Alice  foaf:age 38;
> >> >             g:child :Bob, :Charlie;
> >> >             is  g:child of  :Edna, :Fred;
> >> >             foaf:basedNear :London;
> >> >             is dc:author of [ dc:title "My life"; dc:date "1999"] .
> >> >
> >> > - It is convenient for machine turtle writers.  If you can use the
> >> > is ...of syntax, then you can serialize any acyclic graph of bnodes without
> >> > having up make up nodeids for the serialzation, just using [brackets].
> >> >
> >> > - By allowing a predicate to be used in either direction, it decreases
> >> > the motivation for the antipattern define both p and inverse of p for all p.
> >> > In other words, of you can write   "is child of" you don't need
> >> > to define a separate "parent" property.
> >>
> >> That is a VERY good argument for it. The others are user convenience issues, but this one can have far-reaching effects on deployed linked data.
> >
> > A massive +1. Having been burned by that in the past, it is indeed a very good argument for it.
> >
> > The argument about generating Turtle data from pre-existing hashes is also a very good one. I've written a few of these 'RDFizers' in the past, just recursively going through a hash and outputting a string that happens to be valid Turtle (see https://github.com/moustaki/bbc-serialiser for example, which is currently in use on a few BBC websites) - and having a way to write triples in both directions make that a *lot* easier...
> 
> If (a) it could be done identically in SPARQL 1.1 and Turtle (b) it
> was done with punctuation (e.g. ^) rather than pseudo-English, i'd be
> supportive.
> 
> (Is 'is isPrimaryTopicOf of' the same as 'primaryTopic'? The existence
> of isPrimaryTopicOf is a good reason for exploring such a design...)
> 
> Every difference we create between SPARQL and Turtle diminishes the
> value and teachability of both...

I don't really mind about pseudo-English or symbols, although it's quite clear it would be great to be as close to SPARQL as we possibly can.

Best,
y

> 
> cheers,
> 
> Dan

Received on Wednesday, 18 July 2012 13:01:09 UTC