Re: Oracle's stand regarding N-TRIPLES

Yes, we support N-Triples, but it's much less useful that it could be, as it doesn't support a common unicode encoding.

- Steve

On 2011-08-19, at 16:56, Zhe Wu wrote:

> Hi Steve,
> 
> I was under the impression that your product supported N-TRIPLES. Guess I was wrong.
> Adding a new format can be more efficient for one system, and can be more in-efficient for another
> system.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Zhe
> 
> On 8/19/2011 2:17 AM, Steve Harris wrote:
>> 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")
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>> 
> 
> 

-- 
Steve Harris, CTO, Garlik Limited
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Received on Friday, 19 August 2011 22:40:51 UTC