Re: [TTL] Standardizing N-Triples

On 2011-04-02, at 21:28, Eric Prud'hommeaux wrote:
>> The relative IRI thing can be achieved by using and serving up
>> Turtle. We could therefore keep N-triples with a design centered on
>> a dump format, and sticking to only absolute IRIs makes sense there
>> to "freeze" the data.
> 
> It's actually this use case which motivated me to consider the value
> of transporability. Well, that, plus simple generator scripts (for
> e.g. dumping a database) which are portable between systems if they
> don't embed a base IRI. I'm not sure this matters a lot one way or the
> other; just trying to guess the discriminators which will cause folks
> to use NTriples.
> 
> I'm not actually convinced that it's worth foisting another
> sublanguage (or profile, if you prefer) on the world. I understand
> that the principle motivation is the efficiency of dumping an
> reloading, but I expect that far more clock cycles get introduced
> responsibly lexing IRIs and unicode literals than by all the rest of
> productions which distinguish turtle from ntriples.

I have to disagree. I've not built a full Turtle parser myself, but I've built an N-Triples one, and a good portion of a Turtle one (both by hand, not with a compiler-compiler), and the N-Triples one is significantly more efficient, per triple. 

As further evidence the raptor N-Triples parser is also significantly faster per triple than the Turtle one.

The fact that people are using N-Triples in preference to Turtle for large dumps currently seems like good evidence that it is useful for some cases.

- Steve

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Received on Sunday, 3 April 2011 10:24:56 UTC