Re: On Graphis in Turtle (was Re: today's minutes available)

On Fri, Sep 30, 2011 at 6:39 AM, Steve Harris <steve.harris@garlik.com>wrote:

> On 2011-09-30, at 01:24, Lee Feigenbaum wrote:
>
> > On 9/29/2011 9:41 AM, Mischa Tuffield wrote:
> >> Hello Again,
> >>
> >>
> >> On 28 Sep 2011, at 23:45, Arnaud Le Hors wrote:
> >>
> >>> Hi all,
> >>> I was on a cellphone driving and it was too noisy for me to voice my
> >>> opinion then but I meant to say that, regarding the Graphs in Turtle
> >>> question, I find the @graph proposal more appealing than the {} one. I
> >>> think it is more consistent with what we already have in Turtle.
> >>>
> >>> It might sound silly but on a practical level I also find it
> >>> convenient to
> >>> be able to add an @graph statement in my existing document without
> having
> >>> to re-indent all the following lines the way I would with the {}
> >>> proposal.
> >>> I know that's not necessarily a high priority criteria but at the same
> >>> time Turtle was invented to make it easy for humans to write and read
> rdf
> >>> so I'd argue it's not totally off base either.
> >>
> >> Personally, I would rather not invent new things, and stick with one of
> >> the existing quad based serialisations, i.e. TriG or N-Quads.
> >
> > A strong strong +1 to this. I have a vested interest in TriG, but even if
> that weren't to be the group's consensus, I strongly favor choosing
> something that exists and is widely implemented than inventing anything new.
> At the most I'd consider extensions to the existing systems, such that
> existing documents remain valid, but anything more would have to have clear
> and substantial benefit to be worth the cost of this group inventing
> something new.
>
> Another strong +1
>
> Additionally there are significant issues to handling files which may
> contain triples, or quads, but you can't tell at the point you begin the
> parse.
>

+1.  I live in a world where RDF documents are often uploaded to a web
server from some filesystem, and we can't rely on having a valid mime type
to tell us what we're parsing.  Being able to tell before we get halfway
through a document what type it is would be very helpful.

Would it be worthwhile to introduce an optional @version directive as the
first line of Turtle-like syntaxes to help with this?  Something along the
lines of:

@version "text/trig" .
@base <http://example.org/> .
...

This just popped into my mind and I haven't really thought it through that
much, just throwing it out there...

-Alex



>
> - Steve
>
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