Re: [Turtle] Two formats (was: Re: Turtle, Qurtle, Super-Turtle, N-Triple, N-Quads, Trig - BC and Scope)

On 5 Mar 2011, at 22:59, Steve Harris wrote:
>> If we had made N-Quads syntactically disjoint from N-Triples, then we'd get the situation where a system that only supports N-Triples rejects an N-Quads file that has has “DEFAULT” at the end of every line.
> 
> Good! That means something else than a file full of triples.

Well, depending on how you squint, both encode a set of triples in an unnamed graph.

> If I send LOAD <http://foo.example/file> to a SPARQL Update store that doesn't load into the default graph, but N-Quads with DEFAULT on the end would, I hope. 

Hm, that's a good point.

>>> I also regard N-Triples as a "small-scale" format.
>> 
>> Why? Its advantages over Turtle (easy to grep/sed, easy to parse with O(1) memory, easy to merge) seem to be relevant for large files but not for small ones.
> 
> It's very cheap to generate, compared to Turtle. Useful if you're doing a lot of small imports, e.g. metadata, and data from web crawls.
> 
> If you're generating one Turtle file with 20 triples in, and importing it, the cost isn't significant. But, if you generating 200 files per second, each with 20 triples, scattered across a big cluster, it all adds up.
> 
> We do also use SPARQL Update (which is pretty TriG like), but a HTTP PUTable syntax is easier for us to work with when there's only a single graph being updated in one operation.

Thanks. These are quite compelling arguments against the proposal “Unify N-Triples and N-Quads into a single format with same media type”.

I'm still not convinced that N-Quads being a syntactic superset of N-Triples is a bad idea.

Best,
Richard




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Received on Saturday, 5 March 2011 23:50:20 UTC