Re: Working Draft feedback items

Steve Harris wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 10, 2005 at 04:30:49 +0000, Andy Seaborne wrote:
> 
>>Steve Harris wrote:
>>
>>>On Sun, Mar 06, 2005 at 04:58:16 +0000, Andy Seaborne wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>== 4 == Syntactic support for reification
>>>>
>>>>Some people use reification and use it a lot - some people use named
>>>>graph-like approaches and avoid reification - most people just don't use 
>>>>either.
>>>
>>>
>>>The others seem good, and I have no opinion on this...
>>
>>In progress. I have put this in and have a @@ToDo@@ to explain it in rq23.
>>
>>Also  ?id << ?s ?p ?o >>
>>
>> ?id   rdf:subject  ?s
>> ?id   rdf:pedicate ?p
>> ?id   rdf:object   ?o
>>
>>Also  x:z << ?s ?p ?o >>
>>
>> x:z   rdf:subject  ?s
>> x:z   rdf:pedicate ?p
>> x:z   rdf:object   ?o
> 
> 
> I'd like to repeat my dislike for this syntax, << and >> have been used
> for a lot of things in other languages, and this seems like an odd one - I
> get the reference, guillemets are quotation marks*, and << looks a bit like
> a guillemet, but it still seems ugly to me.
> 
> If the group wants some sugar for reified triples then I'd prefer it if it
> was more inkeeping with the rest of the SPARQL syntax, so something like
> REIFIED ?x { ?s ?p ?o } or fn:reified(?x, ?s, ?p, ?o) or similar.
> 
> - Steve
> 
> * NB not all countries use outward guillemets, some use >> foo >> or
>      >> foo <<.
> 

I considered various things - the reason I settled on using punctuation, not 
words, was because it is syntactic support for writing triples out in full, much 
like () and [] and it is not a graph pattern combining operator.

Single character markers, like *, aren't very clear.  ** is a bit heavy in some 
monospace fonts (as are %%) . @@ is something else in W3C-speak.  # is a 
comment. etc etc.

There are various choices of punctuation that would work - I did consider !! but 
that is shouting, not stating.  N3 uses ! for paths.

	Andy

Received on Friday, 11 March 2005 10:15:38 UTC