Re: Named Graphs in RDFa

On Sunday 01 February 2009, Michael Hausenblas wrote:
> You rightly conclude that we very likely need a new attribute but
> then state that 'this document does not define what that attribute is
> called'. Hm. I think this is too much relying on a convergent market.
> I can't see how this should scale.

Yup, this is also my main concern with the current draft. We've 
discussed it at some length, then we figured that we have a 
philosophical disagreement here, and that we'd better take it to the 
list. :-) Then, I asked Toby to hold off until I had written up my RDFa 
Templates idea, which is the motivating use case, and that's now here:

http://www.kjetil.kjernsmo.net/software/rat/

As you can see in this draft, I use xml:id for the named graph. Toby has 
several good arguments against that, but I kept it as a starting point 
for discussion. 

I think the very reason to write a spec (rather than just API 
documentation) is to avoid that people need to read documentation that 
I write, instead they just need to read the spec, and it will just 
work. So, a private agreement, I feel doesn't achieve that goal, though 
it may be useful as an extension mechanism.

I'm attaching a diff I wrote to a Jan 19th draft of the spec. The 
essence of this was to define @xml:id as the simplest way of creating a 
graph name, I wrote:

The simplest way to markup a graph name is to use the xml:id attribute. 
The value space of this attribute is full URIs and the lexical space is 
similar to xhtml:id. Therefore, if the base URI of the document is 
http://example.com/document then the attribute xml:id="foo" represents 
the URI http://example.com/document#foo. Implementations of this 
specification must accept graph names set by this attribute by default.

So, my idea was that users would always be able to identify a graph 
using xml:id, but could also use a more flexible graph naming scheme by 
private agreement.

Cheers,

Kjetil
-- 
Kjetil Kjernsmo
Programmer / Astrophysicist / Ski-orienteer / Orienteer / Mountaineer
kjetil@kjernsmo.net
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