Re: Need for a canonical byte stream for an RDF graph

On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 4:48 PM, Ian Davis <ian.davis@talis.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 12:39 AM, Gavin Carothers <gavin@topquadrant.com> wrote:
>> It seems that creating a standard canonical byte stream based on an
>> abstract syntax graph would be very useful. It also seems reasonably
>> easy. The simplest naive approach of sorting N-Triples works
>> reasonably well. Until that is you encounter our good old friend Blank
>> Nodes. Happily the majority of the work needed to address blank nodes
>> can be found in Jeremy Carroll's paper "Signing RDF Graphs"
>> http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2003/HPL-2003-142.html from back in
>> 2003.
>
> Wouldn't the skolemization proposals make this a lot easier? Skolemize
> the blank nodes according to a deterministic pattern, then sort, then
> sign.

That was one of my hopes early on following the skolemization work.
However as the current skolemization processes demands that two
systems must skolemize blank nodes to different URIs this doesn't work
that well in practice. It may be that the skolemization process can be
defined in terms of c14n algorithm.

Cheers,
Gavin

Received on Thursday, 23 June 2011 23:53:16 UTC