Re: [TTL] Standardizing N-Triples

Eric Prud'hommeaux wrote:
> * 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.

A very good point Eric, personally I hadn't came across this with 
N-Triples yet due to my own use-cases so far, although I guess in 
hindsight I can see uses for relative IRIs here too..

Jury's out for me on this one I'm afraid, can't weigh up the cost / 
possible ambiguity of relative IRIs vs having a simple unambiguous format.

Saying that.. I think we can reasonably expect people only to use 
relative IRIs on the web, and not come crying because they've used them 
in a base-less environment..!

Best,

Nathan

Received on Friday, 1 April 2011 20:41:03 UTC