Re: Two thoughts on Turtle

On 07/06/11 22:48, Sandro Hawke wrote:

> 2.  Turtle Barewords
>
> I think there is a large class of users that would appreciate being able
> to write:
>
>          @prefix<http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/>.
>          [] a Person; name "Sandro Hawke", mbox<mailto:sandro@w3.org>.
>          [] a Person; name "Ivan Herman". mbox<mailto:ivan@w3.org>.
>
> Note that I left out a whole lot of colons.
>
> N3 does something like this, although it uses:
>
>          @prefix default<http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/>.
>
> which is okay, too.

N3 has

:s has :name of "Sandro"

Aside from the native language issue here, I'd rather go the other way 
and remove @ from @prefix and @base so that they are not language tags 
(I don't expect this to happen :-)

Then keywords are left for structures on top of Turtle (e.g. SPARQL) 
maybe expressions like rules or a data scripting language.

> TimBL designed N3 to be future-proof around this by saying if you use a
> default like this, you can't use keywords like "a" without also
> declaring them, with "@keyword a".   That made sense at the time [2],
> but I don't think it's something we need to worry about any more.  I
> don't think Turtle will be getting new keywords, without a leading "@",
> without a change of media type.  [3]
>
> I know this is a problem for SPARQL, which does have lots of keywords
> and is likely to add more; I don't have a good solution for that.

>
> I suppose some people might hold that colons are good for people, always
> reminding them that they *could* be using other namespaces, but I'm not
> convinced.  There's a large audience who I think can and probably should
> use Turtle who will be using it mostly with one namespace and will
> appreciate not having to learn to work with and around a lot of
> unnecessary colons.

There are important data items that does not have convenient forms : 
dates and dateTimes.

Would it be useful to allow bare dates/dateTimes?

:x dc:date 2010-06-08 .

 Andy

>
>       -- Sandro
>
> [1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/2010Nov/0218.html
> [2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-interest/2001Jan/0170
> [3] And if this is my "there is a world market for maybe five computers"
> statement, I can live with that.

:-)

Received on Wednesday, 8 June 2011 13:57:40 UTC