RE: IRI Templates

+CC public-csv-wg(-comments)


On Friday, February 21, 2014 6:33 AM, David Booth wrote:
> Personally, I would prefer not to overload JSON-LD this way.  This
> essentially amounts to a transformation rule.  And although
> transformation rules are useful and neede, I would prefer to have them
> specified as a separate layer.

I've raised an issue regarding IRI templates 2 years ago [1] and we
concluded back then to "not add any normative language relating to IRI
templates or other transformations".

As is, framing is not really suitable for this as it expects the input to
already be valid JSON-LD. I think what you want is a generic mechanism to
map CSV to RDF. You can then easily serialize it (and frame it) in JSON-LD.

I haven't followed the work in the CSV WG at all till now but it appears to
me that there exists already an (almost complete) solution that you could
leverage: R2RML [2] (I'm sure this has already been discussed). If you add a
way to reference a JSON-LD context or frame, you are quite close to what you
want to achieve I think:
  CSV -> RDF -> JSON-LD


Cheers,
Markus


[1] https://github.com/json-ld/json-ld.org/issues/108
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/2012/REC-r2rml-20120927/



--
Markus Lanthaler
@markuslanthaler



> On 02/20/2014 08:50 PM, Gregg Kellogg wrote:
> > As part of work on the CSV WG, I've put forward the concept of CSV-LD
> > [1]. As I've discussed before, the idea is to use something like a
> > JSON-LD frame to map column values in a CSV to turn it into JSON-LD.
> >
> > I discussed the idea of IRI Templates (really @id templates) on the
> > mailing list [2]. The idea is that fields in a CSV may be used to
> > identify entities, but they may not explicitly include an identifier.
> > In some cases, it may take two columns to determine a unique
> > identifier, for example when a database dump has a composite primary
> > key.
> >
> > The idea I had is that one or more column values might be used to
> > create a template for an IRI or Blank Node. This concept might be
> > more generally useful for JSON-LD framing, but I wanted to get some
> > reaction from this list. From the email:
> >
> > [[[ I've been hand-waving around this, but one way to do this might
> > be to extend the context definition to describe identifier
> > templates:
> >
> > { "region_id": {"@id": "_:{Sales Region}", "@type": "@idTemplate"} }
> >
> > I'm sure we can do much better, but the basic idea is that column
> > values can be used within a template used to construct an IRI or
> > BNode identifier, using some suitable rules. We could then use
> > "region_id" in the frame, with the understanding that it will be
> > expanded using the template defined in the context.
> >
> > { "@id": "region_id", "@type": "ex:SalesRegion", "Sales Region":
> > null, "ex:period": { "@type": "ex:SalesPeriod", "Quarter": null,
> > "Sales": null } } ]]]
> >
> > The idea would be that if a term is of type @idTemplate, it could be
> > used as a key or value (in this case, the value of @id), and it would
> > be processed based on other properties of the associated node ("Sales
> > Region" here). Obviously, this would require some normalization as
> > well, so that the result would be legal. A more complete example
> > would be the following:
> >
> > { "@context": { "dc": "http://purl.org/dc/terms/", "rdf":
> > "http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#", "ex":
> > "http://example/", "Sales Region": "dc:title", "Quarter":
> > "dc:title", "Sales": "rdf:value", "region_id": {"@id": "_:{Sales
> > Region}", "@type": "@idTemplate"} }, "@id": "region_id", "Sales
> > Region": null, "ex:period": { "Quarter": null, "Sales": null } }
> >
> > I suppose that filling in the template term would be part of
> > compaction, and the @idTemplate would allow such a term to be used as
> > the value of @id. This could presumably be done in a CSV-LD spec, but
> > it might be more generally useful as part of JSON-LD Framing.
> >
> > Thoughts?
> >
> > Gregg Kellogg gregg@greggkellogg.net
> >
> > [1] https://www.w3.org/2013/csvw/wiki/CSV-LD [2]
> > http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-csv-wg/2014Feb/0119.html
> >
> >
> >

Received on Friday, 21 February 2014 10:12:51 UTC