CSV/TSV comments

Danny Kahn, a colleague of mine at Cambridge Semantics, looked over 
http://www.w3.org/2009/sparql/docs/csv-tsv-results/results-csv-tsv.html 
. He compared it with how we currently implement CSV and TSV results to 
SPARQL in Anzo.

Here are the differences:

1. Both our CSV and TSV formats do not serialize the details of RDF terms.

2. Our implementation optionally includes headers for CSV. We don't use 
the header=absent content type parameter to indicate this.

3. Our TSV implementation makes the header line optional, just as with CSV.


I have not been that engaged in this discussion yet, but I'm surprised 
to see these significant differences between CSV and TSV, whereas I 
normally view these as basically the same format but with a different 
separating character. I'm not a big fan of the TSV format as currently 
specified.

Looking briefly over the document, I think the section on serializing 
CSV needs a bit of work -- it seems to specify the order that solution 
bindings should emitted in terms of the header row, but the header row 
is optional. Even in cases where the header row is omitted, rows needs 
to emit variables in a consistent order, right?

Lee

Received on Wednesday, 27 July 2011 18:22:40 UTC