Re: [TURTLE] Turtle Inverse Properties

On Sat, 2012-08-18 at 22:53 -0400, Lee Feigenbaum wrote:
> On 8/17/2012 3:58 PM, David Booth wrote:
> > On Fri, 2012-08-17 at 11:30 -0700, Gavin Carothers wrote:
> > [ . . . ]
> >> Objections to both original syntax and revised syntax
> >> =====================================================
> >>
> >> Turtle is a reasonably settled languages, changes made by the working
> >> group so far have been limited to areas of existing differences in
> >> implementation.
> >>
> >> No demand over years of implementation experience
> > I think that may be slightly misleading, because Turtle was not
> > previously standardized, and hence was on the same footing as N3, and
> > those who wanted to use this feature simply considered their RDF to be
> > N3 instead of Turtle.  I.e., there was no *need* to demand it in Turtle
> > because Turtle was not previously chosen over N3 for standardization.
> 
> In turn, I think this is misleading -- Turtle has far more 
> implementations than N3, and so -- standard or not -- has had far more 
> opportunity for users of those implementations (of which there are many) 
> to demand this feature in a volume that would have lead to it being 
> adopted. This has not happened even a single time that I know of. Given 
> the scarcity of N3 implementations, I sincerely doubt that users simply 
> abandoned their existing Turtle toolkits and picked up an N3 toolkit 
> instead so that they could use inverse property syntax.

Fair enough.  I guess the fact that Turtle is much more widely used than
N3 is pretty good empirical evidence that the lack of this feature was
not as important as using a format with wider support.

I would categorize this feature as a "nice to have".   But I am a little
concerned that if it isn't added to Turtle, then we may never get it,
because once Turtle is standardized there may not be sufficient
motivation to standardize N3.


-- 
David Booth, Ph.D.
http://dbooth.org/

Opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect those of his employer.

Received on Monday, 20 August 2012 02:02:21 UTC