Re: Annotation syntax [was: SPARQL* test suite]

On Wed, 2 Sep 2020 at 09:29, Holger Knublauch <holger@topquadrant.com>
wrote:

Any above syntax would work fine as long as any of them gets de-facto
> standard support. For now we have used [[ ... ]] in our tools yet this
> is easy to change, and if this would make it into a future Jena version
> then we can migrate to that implementation instead of our home-baked hack.
>
> Does anyone here see problems with adding such a TTL extension?
>

Apart from which particular delimiter we use (no strong opinions on the
proposed candidates apart from observing that [[ ]] has potential
conflicts, as Andy also pointed out), the approach you suggest tacitly
favors PG mode as being more "natural", which is a downside. I also don't
quite see how your original dissatisfaction (having to state the triple
twice to assert it and its annotation when in SA mode) with the current
syntax is solved by this different syntax, except by this "implicit" shift
of intent to favor PG mode.

Compare:

   <<:bob :age 23>> :certainty 0.9 .

with

   :bob :age 23 {| :certainty 0.9 |} .

The focus shifts: in the first syntax variant we are clearly asserting
something *about* Bob's age being 23 (without necessarily asserting that
Bob's age _is_ 23), while in the second variant we are saying Bob's age is
23 and then making an annotative "side remark" about that fact being 90%
certain.

It's a matter of perception (at the end of the day both objectively express
the same information) but I do think it worth pointing this out.

Or do I misunderstand and is the proposal here not to *replace* the << >>
syntax but to allow the second variant *in addition* to enable explicit
"all-in-one" assertion?


Jeen
-- 
Dr Jeen Broekstra (he, him)
*principal software engineer*

jb@metaphacts.com
www.metaphacts.com

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