Re: Convenience suggestion: Allow metadata in a CSV file

On 1 May 2015 at 09:27, Ivan Herman <ivan@w3.org> wrote:
>
>> On 30 Apr 2015, at 18:32 , Jeni Tennison <jeni@jenitennison.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi David,
>>
>> Sorry, I looked at the example metadata that you provided and it includes data, so that misled me (I'll admit I didn't manage to watch the video as I was on a train but I now have and understand the goal there).
>>
>> We did discuss CSV syntax for the metadata early on as well. I was initially keen on this idea myself.
>>
>> However, the problem is that CSV is best suited to tabular information and metadata isn't tabular. You've encountered this in your example where you have rows that are mostly empty in which the column headers are completely irrelevant to the contents of the cells. If you try to support the entirety of the metadata vocabulary I think there will be a number of instances where the constraints of the tabular syntax start to really bite (multiple tables, derived datatypes and foreign keys are the ones that spring to mind). It certainly isn't impossible to support those things, but I think it is difficult and I don't think the result will be particularly user friendly.
>>
>> I think it would be interesting to investigate alternative syntaxes for parts of tabular metadata (eg just schemas) and/or a specialist text-based format for the metadata (ala the compact syntax for RELAX NG or the Manchester syntax for ontologies). But I think these are substantial pieces of work and not things that we can take on right now.
>>
>> I suspect that if supplying metadata for CSV files takes off we will find tools start to develop more user friendly syntaxes to save people writing JSON by hand, as you have done, and these could be used to inform standardisation of such a syntax.
>>
>> So as you suspected, this isn't something that I think we can take on at this stage.
>>
>
> For the records: I agree.
>
> Note that the present metadata syntax is in JSON, but is also JSON-LD compatible. Ie, although not emphasized in the document, the metadata can be expressed in a number of other syntaxes, most obviously Turtle, without any change on the definition of the metadata. Ie, the possibilities for syntaxes are large...

We should also remember that Microdata and RDFa are on many millions
of sites. Whether those formats, or JSON, or Turtle are easiest for
publishers is rather open to endless debate I'm sure. And the
consequences for developers for saying "syntax is any of the above"
can be a major complication too.

Dan

Received on Friday, 1 May 2015 12:37:31 UTC