Re: Toss NTriples -- RDF Reification is all we need (was Re: N3 and N-Triples (was: RDF in HTML: Approaches)

On 2002-06-04 9:51, "ext Michael Kifer" <kifer@cs.sunysb.edu> wrote:

> 
> 
> Patrick Stickler <patrick.stickler@nokia.com> wrote:
>> 
>> On 2002-06-04 3:11, "ext Michael Kifer" <kifer@cs.sunysb.edu> wrote:
>> 
>>>>>>>> "SR" == "Seth Russell" <of Mon, 03 Jun 2002 10:35:26 PDT> writes:
>>> 
>>>   MK> NTriples can be naturally encoded in XML and exchanged.
>>> 
>>>   SR> Is that actually true?   How?
>>> 
>>> <triple><subject ...>subj</subject><property>...</property> <object> ...
>>> </object> </triple>
>> 
>> Why of course. Why did we not see this before?!
>> 
>> We can just use a subset of RDF instead of NTriples:
>> 
>> <rdf:RDF ...>
>>    <rdf:Statement>
>>       <rdf:subject rdf:resource="http://foo.com/bar"/>
>>       <rdf:predicate rdf:resource="voc://abc.org/blarrg"/>
>>       <rdf:object rdf:resource="#node12345"/>
>>    </rdf:Statement>
>>    <rdf:Statement>
>>       <rdf:subject rdf:resource="#node12345"/>
>>       <rdf:predicate rdf:resource="voc://abc.org/booga"/>
>>       <rdf:object>Gumby</rdf:object>
>>    </rdf:Statement>
>>    ...
>> </rdf:RDF>
>> 
>> I hereby propose we toss NTriples altogether and just use RDF/XML
>> as above for all test cases output.
>> 
>> RDF/XML provides all the mechanisms needed to explicitly express
>> the precise triples existing in any RDF graph, as RDF/XML.
>> 
>> (not really joking about this, actually ;-)
> 
> Neither am I. A fine interchange format. The triples languages are for
> humans; their xml serializations -- for machines.

Well, technically, human-usability motivations for NTriples and N3
are out of scope for the RDF specs, as RDF really is about machine
interchange -- not human interfaces to knowledge representation.

It's the same as XML. Lots of folks slammed XML for its serialization
(many still do ;-) until structured and graphical editors for XML
came on the scene.

I have no problems with folks using alternate serializations of
RDF because they are limited to text-only editors and wish to
reduce keystrokes, etc. but please don't propose that such
serializations replace the official XML serialization for RDF.

OK?

Cheers,

Patrick

--
               
Patrick Stickler              Phone: +358 50 483 9453
Senior Research Scientist     Fax:   +358 7180 35409
Nokia Research Center         Email: patrick.stickler@nokia.com