in...of syntax Re: Turtle Last Call: Request for Review

I would like to formalize the request I have made at intervals
to include the     is ... of syntax as in N3 in Turtle.

Motivations:

- It is convenient for human Turtle writers. 
	Example:

	foaf:Person is rdf:type of :Alice, :Bob, :Charlie, :David, :Elisa .

	Example:

	:Alice  foaf:age 38; 
		g:child :Bob, :Charlie;
		is  g:child of  :Edna, :Fred;
		foaf:basedNear :London;
		is dc:author of [ dc:title "My life"; dc:date "1999"] .

- It is convenient for machine turtle writers.  If you can use the
is ...of syntax, then you can serialize any acyclic graph of bnodes without
having up make up nodeids for the serialzation, just using [brackets].

- By allowing a predicate to be used in either direction, it decreases
the motivation for the antipattern define both p and inverse of p for all p.
In other words, of you can write   "is child of" you don't need 
to define a separate "parent" property. 

- Why does turtle have the ability to end a sentence with an extra ";"?
Because it helps when you are putting together a script to
convert other data into RDF.  The "is..of" syntax has the same sort
of value, when you are writing a converter from other data formats
you want to keep the same subject node in play in with syntax 
and output some incoming arcs as well as outgoing ones.

- It does not change the graph model onto which Turtle maps

- It has been in N3 for more than 10 years and it has been a pain
that it is not in Turtle.  it is illogical and difficult to
remember that an N3 feature which is just RDF graphs is not available
in Turtle.

Tim


Looking at http://www.w3.org/2011/rdf-wg/wiki/TF-Turtle

On 2012-07 -11, at 11:26, David Wood wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> The RDF Working Group has published:
>  Turtle: Terse RDF Triple Language [1]
> as a Last Call Working Draft.
> 
> The Last Call period ends 15 September 2012. All feedback is welcome to public-rdf-comments@w3.org.
> 
> Our charter [2] calls for coordination with the following working groups.  We would therefore particularly value comments from:
>  Semantic Web Coordination Group
>  Internationalization Activity
>  SPARQL Working Group
>  RDFa Working Group
>  Web Application Working Group
>  XML Query Working Group
> 
> Regards,
> Dave
> 
> [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2012/WD-turtle-20120710/
> [2] http://www.w3.org/2011/01/rdf-wg-charter
> 
> 
> 
>

Received on Monday, 16 July 2012 20:36:58 UTC