Re: CSV/TSV comments

Conversely, we are big fan of the TSV format, as written.

We've used a very similar format inside Garlik for 4-5 years, as it's very efficient for Javascript/Perl/Python to process, without losing any typing information, and also easy for humans to read.

The format has been supported in 4store since its public release, and it's reasonably widely used.

The way I look at it is: CSV is for loading into spreadsheets, TSV is for processing by bespoke software.

- Steve

On 2011-07-27, at 19:22, Lee Feigenbaum wrote:

> 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
> 

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Received on Wednesday, 27 July 2011 19:41:16 UTC