Re: Deprecate most "native" RDF serializations

On Sat, May 5, 2012 at 8:11 PM, Sandro Hawke <sandro@w3.org> wrote:
> On Sat, 2012-05-05 at 19:50 -0700, Gavin Carothers wrote:
>> On Sat, May 5, 2012 at 5:54 PM, Sandro Hawke <sandro@w3.org> wrote:
>> > On Fri, 2012-05-04 at 11:22 -0400, Manu Sporny wrote:
>> >>
>> >> """
>> >> TURTLE Lite would effectively be a subset of TURTLE - N-Quads, or
>> >> something that would be N-Quads-like (allowing for either "s p o" or
>> >> "s
>> >> p o c" statements).
>> >> """
>> >>
>> >> Gavin has asserted that TURTLE already supports N-Triples... now all
>> >> we
>> >> need to do is to make N-Quads a subset of TURTLE and we're good for
>> >> TURTLE Lite.
>> >
>> > Since a subset can't include things not in its superset, I guess you're
>> > saying that Turtle should include the dataset/quad stuff?  Do you have a
>> > proposed syntax for that?   I don't think adding the label after the
>> > triple, as in N-Quads, works well in Turtle...
>> >
>> >  s p o1 g, o2 g; p2 o3 g.
>> >
>> > Nah.   Maybe just like trig, where you have a triple you could have
>> > label + { graph }.   Or maybe a GRAPH keyword like in SPARQL.  I kind of
>> > like that.
>>
>> Yes, had proposed adding @graph to Turtle. There wasn't support for
>> doing so. Too much of a change to the language.
>
> It might be more accurate to say there was more opposition than support
> at the time.   There was some support.   Manu might be offering more --
> and, more to the point, he's making a new argument that might
> potentially be supported by data.   (He's arguing for simplicity to
> appeal to potential adopters.  RDF experts are in some cases the worst
> people to assess that kind of argument.)

See http://www.w3.org/2011/rdf-wg/wiki/Graphs-In-Turtle
Email thread http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-wg/2011Sep/0170.html
Minutes http://www.w3.org/2011/rdf-wg/meeting/2011-09-28

This was close to my initial argument as well 7 months ago. Publishing
Turtle as a preferred way to publish RDF at the same as publishing a
new recommendation about named graphs and not being able to use named
graphs in Turtle seems poor. Also existing implementations today
already use special comments in Turtle documents to support something
very like named graphs. 8 months ago figured I'd wait to worry about
this more till we settled on named graph support in the next 3 months
... yeah ... The nearness of a Turtle LC and the ongoing
confusion/conversation/whatever on named graphs is reducing my own
support for trying to support "named graphs" in Turtle. This likely
means that if whatever we come up with for named graphs sees wide
adoption more people will move towards TriG (or whatever Turtle like
multi graph format) as the default format rather than
Turtle/N-Triples. Lee Feigenbaum already comments to that effect in
the thread. If your using multi graphs today, you can't really use
Turtle.

>
> Other than backward compatibility -- which we're breaking on other
> places already, can you think of any reason we're using @prefix instead
> of SPARQL's PREFIX?

At this time we have non compliant PARSERS. All existing Turtle
documents should still be valid Turtle documents (with possible very
odd edge cases), if this is not the case then I would consider it a
bug in the new specification. Saying that old parsers are not
compliant is very different than saying that old documents are not
Turtle any more.

>
>  -- Sandro
>
>> >
>> > Steve has argued very strongly, and Andy just mentioned again, that
>> > people want to know from the mime type whether they'll be getting
>> > triples or quads.   Steve sees it as a big security issue -- you don't
>> > want to load quads in from the Web and have them over-write your
>> > crawler's internal state metadata or data that was supposedly fetched
>> > from other address. I'm not convinced, myself, not at all, because I
>> > think one needs to have an "untrusted" mode of loading quads that
>> > renames all the graphs.
>> >
>> >    -- Sandro
>> >
>> >
>>
>
>

Received on Sunday, 6 May 2012 04:09:05 UTC