Re: [Turtle] Two formats

On 2011-03-03, at 11:18, Andy Seaborne wrote:
> On 03/03/11 07:51, Steve Harris wrote:
...
>> Consequently there are several cases where the user would like to
>> have different behaviours depending on whether the file you're
>> parsing has 3 or 4 columns, so lets make it easy to find out without
>> pre-parsing the whole file.
> 
> Does
> 
> N-quads serializes a dataset (default graph and named graphs)
> N-Triples serializes a graph
> 
> work for you?

Yes.

> It means that in N-Quads, the absence of the 4th column means default graph.  I know 4Store does not have an independent default graph but some other systems do.  N-Quads should capture the generality of an RDF dataset or graph store.

FWIW, 4store does have a default graph (now), but internally it has a URI. By default it's just treated like another named graph.

I have a slight reservation about having N-Quads lines with only 3 columns writing to the default graph, it means that "mv foo.nt foo.nq" gives a syntactically legal file, but changes the meaning of the file quite dramatically.

Something more like the following would be my preference:
<http://example.com/a> <http://example.com/a> <http://example.com/a> DEFAULT .

It also ties in to SPARQL 1.1's DROP DEFAULT etc.

- Steve

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Steve Harris, CTO, Garlik Limited
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Received on Thursday, 3 March 2011 21:54:12 UTC