ACTION: elaborate on 4.4

On Mon, Jun 07, 2004 at 12:01:40PM -0500, Dan Connolly wrote:

> -- 4.4 User-specifiable Serialization
> 
> ACTION: KendellC to elaborate on 4.4  

-sigh-... I'll know DAWG is finished when Dan spells my name correctly
 two times in a row. :>

Okay, to discharge this action item...

I proposed 4.4 because there are now, by my count, several
exchange serializations of RDF graphs, with varying statuses: de jure
standards, de facto standards, dead-end proposals, v. promising
proposals, wild-ass ideas:

1. canonical RDF-XML (with a couple of well-known variants)
2. Notation3
3. NTriples
4. TRiX
5. Turtle
6. RXR
7. YAML (I'm working on this one; it has some nice features)

And probably a few others I'v forgotten or never heard of.

These all have different properties, different advantages and
disadvantages; some are more widely implemented, some are good for
resource-constrained use cases, and so on. But what seems clear to me
is that no one of these is going to crowd out the others. Thus, I
think we should recognize that fact -- if it is a fact -- and act
accordingly.

So I want to be able to request or negotiate for -- and I'm *today*
agnostic as to where, in the protocol or in the QL -- my preferred
exchange serialization. That was the point of my proposal.

Open design issues (many of which I expect can be analogized to
content negotiation in HTTP) include:
   
   - how to request one's preferred exchange serialization; 
   - whether it's a request or a negotiation;
   - whether to identify exchange serializations by Internet Media Type, by
     URI, or by canonical short name;
   - which format should be the default? (Ok, that one is easy!)

Also, is this requirement totally parasitic on 3.4? In other
words, if 3.4 is rejected, should we still be able to specify which
kind of exchange serialization one prefers for variable binding
results? I don't see why not, and, in fact, I think that this design
objective is applicable to both 3.2 and 3.4 is an indication of its
utility.

I hope this discharges my action item to expand on my reasons for 4.4.

Best,
Kendall Clark

Received on Monday, 7 June 2004 13:19:28 UTC