Re: Turtle support for Multiple Graphs, suggestion

On Fri, Apr 1, 2011 at 2:32 PM, David Wood <david.wood@talis.com> wrote:

> On Apr 1, 2011, at 14:15, Richard Cyganiak wrote:
>
> > On 1 Apr 2011, at 23:07, David Wood wrote:
> >> The WG has expressed an interest in changing Turtle very, very little.
> >
> > Right.
> >
> >> That alone makes this proposal interesting enough to discuss.
> >
> > I conclude the opposite!
> >
> > Turning Turtle from a single-graph triple format to a multi-graph quad
> format is a *much* bigger change than any syntactic tweaks or extensions.
>
> The Charter says:
>
> "Standardize the Turtle RDF Syntax (see the Workshop result page for
> further references). Either that syntax or a related syntax should also
> support multiple graphs and graph stores (see work item listed below). This
> work should take into account the 14 January 2008 Turtle Syntax document,
> N3, TriG, and the SPARQL Query Language syntax."
>
> We as a WG have not yet concluded whether there should be "that syntax or a
> related syntax".
>

True, but the proposals currently being considered by the Turtle task force
(http://www.w3.org/2011/rdf-wg/wiki/TF-Turtle/Proposals) involve
standardizing Turtle based on the existing team submission, and a "Qurtle"
extension to support multiple (named) graphs.

I thought that the consensus on the mailing list was that Turtle would be
mostly unmodified from the Jan 2010 editors' draft, save for minor cleanup
of the syntax (resolve ambiguities around whitespace/tokens, alignment with
SPARQL syntax) and a better specification of the mapping to RDF triples, and
that any extensions to the Turtle syntax to support graphs would explicitly
be done as part of a new language with a distinct media type (albeit
possibly specified in the same document as Turtle).

-Alex