On 2011-04-02, at 18:49, Alex Hall wrote: ... > > 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. > > The headache (for me at least) isn't resolving the relative IRIs, it's picking a base IRI to resolve against when one isn't readily available. Yeah, but that's not a new problem. All current RDF systems have to deal with it. > I remember being surprised when parsing some Turtle with Jena to find that it was emitting IRIs relative to the base directory from which I was running the program. That isn't to pick on Jena -- if you don't have a base IRI then the user home directory makes as much sense as any other IRI you could arbitrarily choose. The point is that you have to make that choice, and not all systems do so consistently. Not consistently between systems no, but all systems I know do it consistently within themselves. I agree it's not a brilliant situation though. > > I agree with Eric that it's useful, I'm not sure whether there will be systems that only consume NTriples though. > > Yes, Eric's point about portable archives with cross references between documents is well taken. - Steve -- Steve Harris, CTO, Garlik Limited 1-3 Halford Road, Richmond, TW10 6AW, UK +44 20 8439 8203 http://www.garlik.com/ Registered in England and Wales 535 7233 VAT # 849 0517 11 Registered office: Thames House, Portsmouth Road, Esher, Surrey, KT10 9AD
Received on Sunday, 3 April 2011 10:18:45 UTC