Re: Merging @base and @vocab and change their behavior

Hello!

I have to go with -1 on this. It would mean dropping the ability to
use them for the separate concerns of resolving resources and their
properties/classes.

I don't think it is the common case that subjects and objects share
the same base as the used vocabulary/vocabularies. Think for instance
of foaf profiles, bibo records and goodrelations items. It is very
beneficial to use @vocab to set the prefix IRIs of either foaf, bibo
or gr, hence enabling the use of simple term tokens. But that would
not be the useful to resolve subjects and objects against, which will
likely reside on one or many domains separate from that of these
vocabularies. (And even more so with data described using the
schema.org vocabulary!)

And note that @vocab doesn't (at least it shouldn't!) resolve relative
IRIs – it is prepended to "opaque" terms the result of which is
interpreted as an IRI. Quite different from the base URI mechanism (of
at least HTML, XML and Turtle).

In my current work, I use the canonical IRI of the current subject as
@base, enabling me to use absolute IRIs (starting with "/") to link to
other resources within the same domain (data space) *and* to use
fragment IRIs to link to parts of the same resource (e.g. "#p_1" for a
paragraph). And I also use @vocab for the main vocabulary (which is
quite separate from the current resource).

The analogy of @vocab and @base in JSON-LD to their equivalents in
Turtle would in my view be:

  @prefix : <http://example.org/def/stuff#> . # like @vocab in JSON-LD
  @base <http://example.com/document/one> . # like @base in JSON-LD

  <> a :Document;
    :hasVersion </document/two> .

Which is equivalent to:

  @prefix : <http://example.org/def/stuff#> .

  <http://example.com/document/one> a :Document;
    :hasVersion <http://example.com/document/two> .


Of course, JSON-LD could use @base to resolve non-CURIEs if there is
no defined @vocab. But that might be quite complex if resolving
against them works differently (IRI resolution vs. plain
concatenation). In fact, if you're looking to simplify things, I'd
suggest dropping @base (thus requiring the use of full IRIs in
subjects and objects) and leaving @vocab as it works now. Personally
though (as evident from my mentioned work) I find @base useful.

And note that I definitely think that @base should work for both
subjects and objects. (If it doesn't that sounds like a spec bug.)

(On a side note, it may be worth noting that it's easier to pattern
match on full IRIs (i.e. not use @base), in case you're interested in
an (optional) auto-coercion mechanism for such things. But I digress.)

Best regards,
Niklas



On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 3:49 PM, Markus Lanthaler
<markus.lanthaler@gmx.net> wrote:
> In the current spec we have @base and @vocab to change the base IRI for
> objects and properties (but nothing for subjects). I think that's
> unnecessarily complicated and inconsistent.
>
> I would thus propose to merge @base and @vocab to @base and make it work as
> it currently does in HTML and Turtle, i.e., @base would overwrite the base
> IRI for *all* relative IRIs in the document.
>
>
> --
> Markus Lanthaler
> @markuslanthaler
>
>
>
>
>

Received on Monday, 5 September 2011 21:02:13 UTC