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

On Jul 16, 2012, at 3:36 PM, Tim Berners-Lee wrote:

> 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. 

That is a VERY good argument for it. The others are user convenience issues, but this one can have far-reaching effects on deployed linked data. 

Pat

> 
> - 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
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
> 
> 
> 

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Received on Wednesday, 18 July 2012 03:43:22 UTC