- From: Steve Harris <steve.harris@garlik.com>
- Date: Sun, 6 Mar 2011 01:41:28 +0000
- To: Richard Cyganiak <richard@cyganiak.de>
- Cc: Sandro Hawke <sandro@w3.org>, nathan@webr3.org, RDF-WG <public-rdf-wg@w3.org>
On 2011-03-05, at 23:48, Richard Cyganiak wrote: > 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. I could live with that, just there's a few minor reasons why I think it would better for them to be disjoint. - Steve -- Steve Harris, CTO, Garlik Limited 1-3 Halford Road, Richmond, TW10 6AW, UK +44 20 8439 8203 http://www.garlik.com/ Registered in England and Wales 535 7233 VAT # 849 0517 11 Registered office: Thames House, Portsmouth Road, Esher, Surrey, KT10 9AD
Received on Sunday, 6 March 2011 01:42:04 UTC