Re: BNF expression of RDF Concepts (ISSUE-176)

On 5 December 2013 11:48, Markus Lanthaler <markus.lanthaler@gmx.net> wrote:
> On Thursday, December 05, 2013 12:25 PM, Richard Light wrote:
>> > On 05/12/2013 10:28, Eric Prud'hommeaux wrote:
> [...]
>> This would have to be relatively abstract, in that the Concepts
>> recommendation isn't specifying a serialization format, like Turtle.
>
> Exactly. I fear that including BNF into Concepts would thus be very
> confusing. We tried hard to separate the abstract syntax from concrete
> syntaxes in RDF 1.1.
>
>
>> > Given the timing, it may not be possible to include this at all, or to
>> > include this in a normative section. Will you accept either of those
>> > outcomes?
>>
>> Yes.  I realise that I have come to this discussion at a point where
>> you are about to finalise this document. Also, I am interested to
>> hear whether there is wider support for this idea from within the
>> developer community, but do not take it for granted that such support
>> exists.
>
> I personally am against this for the reason stated above. BNF is, IMO, of
> very limited use if it isn't describing a data format but a data *model*.
> Could you please elaborate a bit on why you think
>> it would introduce standard naming conventions, and structures,
>> which could be followed in whichever programming language was being
>> used for development.
>
> If RDF triples are stored in a relational database for example, do you think
> developers would benefit from the BNF? What if it is stored as JSON-LD in a
> database such as MongoDB or perhaps ElasticSearch?
>
> In any case, I've raised ISSUE-176 [1] to track this. We will get back to
> you with an official shortly.

For a concrete syntax,
http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-syntax-grammar/#section-Infoset-Grammar makes
a lot of sense. For the abstract data model, less so...

Dan

>
> Cheers,
> Markus
>
>
> [1] https://www.w3.org/2011/rdf-wg/track/issues/176
>
>
> --
> Markus Lanthaler
> @markuslanthaler
>
>

Received on Thursday, 5 December 2013 12:35:44 UTC