Re: "Simple Lists" (was Re: ISSUE-77: Should we mark rdf:Seq as archaic (cf ISSUE-24))

On 2011-10-17, at 12:30, Sandro Hawke wrote:

> On Mon, 2011-10-17 at 09:53 +0100, Steve Harris wrote:
>> 
>> A lexical representation of a list could be as simple as a CSV encoded
>> row, e.g. '1,2,3' or '"Alice Foo","Bob Bar","Carol Baz"'. It just has
>> to be something that will be encoded in one literal, and can easily be
>> parsed by a consumer. CSV handling libraries are very common.
> 
> Well, presumably we'd want to allow lists to include types of literals
> and to include objects.   So the lexical representation would have to be
> more like:
> 
> "1"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchemaint>,<http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/card#i>,...
> 
> and there's probably no way to include bNodes (for better or for worse).
> So, it's not great….

I was thinking 1 as in the Turtle literal abbreviated form for "1"^^xsd:integer, "Alice Foo" as in the xsd:string (nee plain literal). It just happens to be compatible with CSV in the common case, but you're correct, there are exceptions which make the parse rules different to CSV, e.g. IRIs with " in them.

bNodes could maybe be done with _:foo, or more easily with the .well-known/genid/ skolem URI forms.

In any case, I think Andy is correct, and it's too much of a radical departure for this WG, but I'd rather see some energy going into that in the future, than shoring up the mechanisms we have now.

- Steve

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Received on Monday, 17 October 2011 13:39:00 UTC