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

Dear Richard,

Thank you again for you comment on the RDF 1.1 Concepts document, recorded
by the RDF WG as ISSUE-176.

You noticed that the document does not include a BNF representation of the
concepts which characterize an RDF graph and suggested that adding one would
be helpful to developers as it would introduce standard naming conventions.

The working group has decided to not include a BNF representation into RDF
1.1 Concepts for a number of reasons. Most importantly, RDF 1.1 Concepts
tries to clearly separate between the abstract syntax (data model) it
describes and concrete syntaxes defined in other documents. We believe that
the addition of BNF to the document would blur that line and confuse readers
(as it has been the case in the past where RDF/XML was often conflated with
RDF's data model).
RDF Concepts already normatively defines all important concepts and
highlights those definitions visually. Redefining them in BNF would require
to connect the BNF symbols to the corresponding concepts. Most of these
symbols would therefore differ only in the capitalization and whitespace and
thus be of limited practical value. On the other hand, naming symbols which
have no corresponding concept defined in the current document (e.g.,
literals which are not language-tagged strings) is, as past discussions have
shown, likely to be very time consuming. Unfortunately, there's only very
little time left given that WG is nearing the end of its chartered life.

Please reply to this message and let us know whether this is an adequate
response to your comments. 


Thanks,
Markus


--
Markus Lanthaler
@markuslanthaler

Received on Friday, 13 December 2013 16:50:56 UTC