Re: Oracle's stand regarding N-TRIPLES

I agree with Jeremy.

For us, the lack of UTF-8 support is a serious impediment to using N-Triples as a bulk dump/restore format.

We use UTF-8 internally to hold RDF literals, as every other format is natively UTF-8, so the export to N-Triples requires a lot of unnecessary and inefficient escaping.

- Steve

On 2011-08-18, at 23:26, Jeremy Carroll wrote:

> Hi Zhe
> 
> I find this a surprisingly strong position.
> When ingesting N-Triples the code path to read UTF-8 and the code path to read \uXXXX escape sequences are probably equally horrible. The UTF-8 code path is the more conventional one to be following on the Web.
> 
> It seems like a fairly small amount of extra code for a vendor to support, with negligible impact on performance. The only downside, that I can see, would be that new data will not be readable by old software, which is the normal downside with new versions of a format.
> 
> We may differ in our judgment about how important that downside is, or I may have missed some other disadvantage that motivates Oracle's strong reaction.
> 
> My understanding is that 2004 N-triples docs will be valid turtle docs ....
> 
> Jeremy
> 
> 
> 
> On 8/18/2011 9:05 AM, Zhe Wu wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> After discussing with the whole Oracle Database Semantic Technologies team, we
>> have the following consensus within Oracle.
>> 
>> 1) The existing N-TRIPLES format [1] is key to Oracle's product;
>> 2) Oracle hasn't received from Oracle's customers any change request/suggestions regarding the current N-TRIPLES syntax;
>> 3) As a platform vendor, Oracle does not see any significant justifications to change/mend the existing syntax;
>> 
>> Hence Oracle will not support any major changes to the existing N-TRIPLE format, including
>> support for UTF-8.
>> 
>> Thanks,
>> 
>> Zhe&  Souri
>> 
>> [1]http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-testcases/#ntriples  (In "RDF Test Cases: W3C Recommendation 10 February 2004")
>> 
>> 
> 
> 

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Received on Friday, 19 August 2011 09:18:11 UTC