Re: reified statements in Turtle

* Dr. A. Joseph Rockmore <rockmore@cyladian.com> [2013-09-17 14:34-0700]
> i don't know if the period for comments on the turtle recommendation are closed (the w3.org web site is a bit inconsistent), but in case its not, i'd like to offer the following.
> 
> i would like to strongly suggest that the turtle recommendation include statement identifiers for reification.  in the work i am doing it is imperative to maintain provenance on all statements, and the only way i have been able to do this in turtle is via explicit reification, such as:
> 
> foo:statement1 a rdf:Statement ;
> 	rdf:subject thingID1 ;
> 	rdf:predicate propertyID1 ;
> 	rdf:object value1 ;
> 	foo:source value 2 ;
> 	foo:dateAsserted value 3 ;
> 	etc.
> 
> this is ugly and overly verbose.  we would like a mechanism like in RDF/XML that supports expressing the statementID explicitly so that reified statements can be made about the statement, without having to express the statements regarding the subject, predicate, and object separately.
> 
> thank you for considering this addition.

Dear Joe,

Thank you for your comment. I'm sorry to say that for the reasons
below, the RDF WG has decided not to develop a shorthand syntax for
reified statements in Turtle:

  There are no existing proposals. The Turtle REC will reflect current
  practice in existing Turtle parsers/serializers, except where the
  language is evolving to towards compatibility with SPARQL.

  The community is mostly using named graphs to address the use cases
  for which reification was intended. Note that Trig is currently in
  last call and expected to go the Candidate Recommendation very soon.
  This specification can be seen as an extension of Turtle for
  expressing named graphs.

  The RDF WG is almost at the end of its charter. Any changes at all
  would make if difficult to publish a Recommendation before the WG
  closes. A re-design of the language to enable reification would
  likely take a long time.

-- 
-ericP

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Received on Sunday, 3 November 2013 00:10:52 UTC