Re: ISSUE-137 (including XML includes)

On 15 Sep 2008, at 18:31, Jim Hendler wrote:

> Maybe I just don't understand what is being proposed by Bijan
>  You're talking about different serializations, but I'm talking  
> about simple syntax level stuff - think about round tripping - how  
> does my tool know the Xinclude was in the document if it was first  
> grabbed by an XML handler which did the include (i.e I don't know  
> how the document reflects it)

It doesn't. I think it goes with the choice of XInclude that the api  
doesn't  know about the XIncludes. If you want to reserialize with  
XIncludes your implementation needs to retain that information.

(As I understand it, first you parse to  DOM (let's say). Then you  
walk the DOM looking for xinclude elements. Then you retrieve the  
corresponding documents and replace the xinclude elements).

It's like entities, or namespace prefixes. Neither of these are round  
trippable through the RDF model. Acutally, neither is owl:imports in  
OWL 1 :( (in the sense that you don't know which axioms go where).

This may make people want to go with a bespoke solution.  
Roundtripping is a different issue than we've thus far discussed.

>  Meanwhile, if I autotranslate the Xinclude to some other  
> serialization (whether it is Turtle or some new thing that grows up  
> around the profiles, which I expect may happen)then what do I put  
> in the document so it knows that if it translates it to RDF/XML it  
> should include the XInclude (and how to do it - unless we're going  
> to standardize the detail - because as best I can tell here's  
> multiple ways to do the same things in Xinclude (and also to tell  
> one from multiple includes)

Let's consider turtle.

I would expect turtle to introduce some new syntax, e.g.,

@include <http:///ex.org/>.

(something like that). Then the transliteration is obvious.

>  It's this latter case I'm worried about - and don't understand at all

I don't think XInclude has too many ways to do something. For RDF/XML  
we may want to restrict the use of XPointer and fallback .

Cheers,
Bijan.

Received on Monday, 15 September 2008 18:06:57 UTC