Re: [TTL] Standardizing N-Triples

On 2011-04-01, at 21:39, Nathan wrote:

> 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..!

Most (all?) of the other RDF syntaxes already allow for relative IRIs, so it doesn't add any new requirement to a system that can already handle RDF.

I agree with Eric that it's useful, I'm not sure whether there will be systems that only consume NTriples though.

- Steve

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Received on Saturday, 2 April 2011 00:35:34 UTC