Re: [TTL] Standardizing N-Triples

* Alex Hall <alexhall@revelytix.com> [2011-04-01 15:29-0400]
> On Fri, Apr 1, 2011 at 3:21 PM, Nathan <nathan@webr3.org> wrote:
> 
> > Andy Seaborne wrote:
> >
> >> On 01/04/11 20:06, Nathan wrote:
> >>
> >>> Andy Seaborne wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> Are there examples of real worlds data that uses relative IRIs in
> >>>> N-triples? If not, we could decide that theer is no base processing in
> >>>> RDF-triples, absolute IRIs only.
> >>>>
> >>>
> >>> How can we have @base processing if there are no directives or @base
> >>> definitions? I'd strongly suggest we keep this to *IRI*s only.
> >>>
> >>
> >> The base is also set by where the file is read from.
> >>
> >
> > Indeed, reliably though? for instance taking in to account the file being
> > sent by email, being part of a zip archive, being in the message body of a
> > PUT HTTP request, being in the body of a GET HTTP response with a
> > Content-Location which differs from the effective request URI?
> >
> > Personally, I'd quite like that can of worms left closed for RDF-Triples :)
> >
> 
> +1, but that reflects my bias as a developer, where often times all I'm
> handed is an input stream with no information about where the content came
> from.  It's nice to be able to use that information when it's available, but
> I think it's extra complexity that's best left out of a simple format like
> N-Triples.

I'm a big fan of relocatable data and often take advantage of the
ability to have a set of interrelated resources which can be moved
from one location to another, or accessed both via e.g. http: and
file: protocols. As an example, the SPARQL test suite manifests have
relative references to the data, queries and expected results. This
allows me to run the tests off the web or to download a tarball to an
arbitrary location and run the tests. Relative references are a very
handy element of web architecture.

I expect that, if we demand absolute IRIs, folks will get around it
with sed scripts and the like, but it will be an unnecessary pain.


> -Alex

-- 
-ericP

Received on Friday, 1 April 2011 20:13:47 UTC