Re: Hello, n3

Hi all,

A (late) hello from me as well.

I’m Ruben, professor of Semantic Web technology at IDLab, Ghent University – imec, and research affiliate at MIT.
I currently spend most of my time on the Solid project with TimBL, in the margin of which we also discuss about N3.

Here’s my brief history with N3:
– In 2009, I was lucky to learn N3 from some of the best (notably Jos).
– In 2010, I used N3 for RPC-based service composition.
– Around 2012, I switched that for resource-oriented service composition with RESTdesc [1,2].
– Around the same time, I wrote an interactive N3 tutorial [3].
– Since 2015, I’m teaching N3 to CS undergrads at UGent [4].
– Used to be a bug hunter for the EYE reasoner [5], until Dörthe broke my record [6].
– I wrote the fastest N3 parser to date, and (as far as I know) the only streaming one [7].
– More recently, added support for N3 PATCH requests to Solid [8]

Unfortunately, I won’t be able to spend much time discussing in this group,
but willing to chip in on any issues I can help with.
I’ll leave it to our PhD student Dörthe to be an active participant from our side.

Nonetheless, here’s my number one topic I’m interested in:
– How to align N3 with the RDF 1.1 standard, in particular with TriG?

Regarding this topic, it is useful to know that:
– The notion of N3 formulas and TriG graphs is different:
   the former represent a closed set, the latter an open set.
– While TriG documents are almost valid N3 documents
   (the equals sign got dropped at some point),
   their semantics are different, notably with respect to blank nodes.

I have talked to TimBL about such an alignment,
indicating that N3 should change its interpretation of blank nodes
if we want it to be compatible with RDF 1.1,
which has been standardized (whereas N3 has not).
However, he remarked (understandably) that N3 semantics
predates TriG by over a decade, and therefore is hard to change.

That’s it from my side.
Wishing you all good discussions, and do ping me if I can be useful.

All the best,

Ruben

[1] http://restdesc.org/

[2] https://ruben.verborgh.org/publications/verborgh_tplp_2017/

[3] http://n3.restdesc.org/

[4] https://rubenverborgh.github.io/WebFundamentals/semantic-web/#notation3

[5] https://ruben.verborgh.org/publications/verborgh_software_2015/

[6] http://eulersharp.sourceforge.net/DONE

[7] https://github.com/rdfjs/N3.js/

[8] https://github.com/solid/node-solid-server

Received on Monday, 10 December 2018 20:29:18 UTC