Re: [Turtle] Two formats (was: Re: Turtle, Qurtle, Super-Turtle, N-Triple, N-Quads, Trig - BC and Scope)

On 3 Mar 2011, at 21:56, Steve Harris wrote:
>> I don't think you can argue that users have one firm expectation for the handling of N-Triples and a different firm expectation for N-Quads.
> 
> I really can. The usecases for those file formats are significantly different.

I dispute that. I believe that both are mostly used for exchanging large RDF dumps (ignoring the use of N-Triples for test cases).

At any rate, the use cases for both formats are far from disjoint.

If we had made N-Quads syntactically disjoint from N-Triples, then we'd get the situation where a system that only supports N-Triples rejects an N-Quads file that has has “DEFAULT” at the end of every line.

>> This is a concern I share, and a reason why I'm opposed to multigraph/quad support in “small-scale” formats like TriG, Turtle, RDF/XML or RDF/JSON.
> 
> I also regard N-Triples as a "small-scale" format.

Why? Its advantages over Turtle (easy to grep/sed, easy to parse with O(1) memory, easy to merge) seem to be relevant for large files but not for small ones.

Best,
Richard

Received on Friday, 4 March 2011 18:04:43 UTC