Re: Turtle version 2006-01-02

Tim Berners-Lee wrote:
> Dave,
> 
> The decimal formats I am happy with as a change to N3, as we discussed
> on IRC.
> 
> Is there any way on which Turtle an/or SparQL have diverged from rather
> than converged with N3?  Has anyone done the work to demonstrate
> (automatically) a mapping between these three?

While working on an update of our N3 writer, I just remembered that
there is one fundamental difference between Turtle and N3: Turtle has
the notion of (document-scoped) blank node identifiers but N3 does not
(AFAIK). RDF/XML and N-Triples also support blank node identifiers.

The lack of blank node identifiers makes it much harder to export RDF
data in N3 format when blank nodes are involved, requiring multiple
passes over the set of statements. Also, some RDF graphs that are
expressible in RDF/XML and Turtle might not be expressible in N3. For
example, is it possible to express that a blank node is a subclass of
itself?

Any chance that N3 will get support for blank node identifiers in the
near future?

Regards,

Arjohn

--
arjohn.kampman@aduna.biz
Aduna BV - http://aduna.biz/
Prinses Julianaplein 14-b, 3817 CS Amersfoort, The Netherlands
tel. +31-(0)33-4659987

Received on Friday, 20 January 2006 14:22:01 UTC