Re: Remaining Open Issues in Turtle

On 15/05/12 03:11, Gavin Carothers wrote:
> And now, an editors opinons...
>
> In general there seems to be a belief that we are "changing Turtle a
> lot". I'm a bit worried by this notion. We have talked about it for a
> while and made some changes to it. However right now all non
> pathological Turtle documents in the wild will have the exact same
> resulting RDF graph as they do today. Most documents that can be
> created using the "new Turtle" syntax will also work just fine with
> existing parsers today. The changes most likely to cause errors were
> also the least controversial. Numbers starting the local part of
> prefix names and blank node labels. Allowing ''' for long literals and
> not only """. These are places where people using Turtle today often
> encounter errors already.

Agreed - there are "changes", as in small incremental 
fixes/improvements, and "changes", as in changes that affect how people 
think about Turtle or see it.

I see our contribution to Turtle as the standardisation of something 
that has already achieved a high degree of interoperability, and that 
means it is a conservative task.

> On Mon, May 14, 2012 at 6:49 PM, Gavin Carothers<gavin@carothers.name>  wrote:
>> 1.1) Change the allowed prefix keyword to include PREFIX (case
>> insensitive) in addition to @prefix (ISSUE-89)
>>
>> 1.2) Change the allowed base keyword to include BASE (case
>> insensitive) in addition to @base (ISSUE-89)
>>
>> 1.3) Remove required trailing period from directives (ISSUE-89)
>
> -1
>
> SPARQL is not Turtle. In SPARQL PREFIX and BASE statements may only be
> at the top of a query and are separated from triple patterns by {}s.
> Queries have no design goal of being concatenated. It is unlikely
> (Imposible?) that dc: is bound to two IRIs in a query. In Turtle
> directives may occur anywhere in the document this makes visually
> identifying directives which change how prefix names and IRIs are
> resolved very important to the human reader. The @ very neatly sets
> them appart from surrounding triple statements.
 >
>> 2) Support top-level blank-predicate-object lists for example (ISSUE-19)
>>
>>         [
>>         foaf:name "Name" ;
>>         foaf:knows<http://example/another>
>>         ] .
>
> +1
>
> I think there was general agreement to do this and it simply got lost
> in the shuffle. In fact I even remember making the changes to one the
> grammars at one point. (No more using Yacker and not version control
> for me!)
>
>>
>> 3) Allow for the null prefix to be bound, for example (No ISSUE)
>>
>>    @prefix foaf:<http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/>.
>>    @prefix<http://example.com/Alice/personal#>.
>>
>>    Alice foaf:knows Bob, Charlie, Dave.
>
> -1
>
> ␀ is not a prefix, it's the lack of a prefix. If for some reason we
> wanted to add bare words to Turtle @prefix is a strange way to do it.
> I don't see any reason to add bare words to Turtle. Not to mention you
> run into 'a' ... which makes it a bit funky, and heck if combined with
> 1.1, 1.2 you also run into prefix and base... no, lets not do this.
>
> Cheers,
> Gavin
>

Received on Tuesday, 15 May 2012 10:04:06 UTC