Re: Default RDF serialization

Hi.

David Booth <david@dbooth.org> writes:

> FWIW, if the LD profile is going to recommend one RDF serialization as
> the default for RDF, I would argue strongly that it should be Turtle
> instead of RDF/XML, because:
>
>  (a) Turtle is far more human friendly to read;
>  (b) RDF/XML is not XML Schema friendly; 
>  (c) RDF/XML has XML-based restrictions (such as prohibiting local names
> that start with a digit) that make certain RDF difficult to represent;
>  (d) RDF/XML has had a history of misleading developers who are familiar
> with XML (but not RDF) into thinking that RDF is just a kind of XML.
>

Let me add my 2 cents :

- IMHO, Turtle (or another human readable format) should be used for
  writing the specifications (i.e. illustrating the /model/ part if
  there's some separation between model and implementations), and
  providing examples, in order to be as much appealing to non-RDF
  experts as possible.

- I'm not sure Turtle support should be a MUST when RDF/XML would only
  have a lower requirement for compliance to the specs of any LDP
  service. At the moment, but this may change, I'm not sure the level of
  support of Turtle in open source libraries in different languages is
  as good as RDF/XML's. For instance, in PHP, if we want to offer a
  migration path for lots of REST PHP apps that may become LDP aware
  some day. The good points of RDF/XML is that you may do some parsing
  with an XML (DOM) parser with some level of success on the client side
  even though you may miss some RDF constructs (like reification, etc.),
  whereas with Turtle, one may be just limited by no supporting library
  available on the hosting server side.

Of course, depending on the ETA of LDP's deliverables, the last remark
may be obsoleted as Turtle gains wider support.

I'd like to make sure we think about non-Java adopters, for instance,
and consider the level of support of the different RDF serializations in
various languages before me make definitive choices.

Just my 2 cents,

Best regards.
-- 
Olivier BERGER 
http://www-public.it-sudparis.eu/~berger_o/ - OpenPGP-Id: 2048R/5819D7E8
Ingenieur Recherche - Dept INF
Institut Mines-Telecom, Telecom SudParis, Evry (France)

Received on Tuesday, 28 August 2012 11:31:33 UTC