- From: Andy Seaborne <andy.seaborne@epimorphics.com>
- Date: Wed, 26 Sep 2012 15:09:46 +0100
- To: public-rdf-wg@w3.org
On 26/09/12 13:53, Sandro Hawke wrote: > I'm surprised at some of the responses about the metadata questions in > my "Dataset Syntax - checking for consensus" email [1]. > > When people publish RDF for real, don't they usually put some triples in > it which indicates who created it, when it was created, and maybe why? > Maybe some folks don't do this, but many people consider this an > essential practice. My sense is that every computer format either has > a metadata mechanism built into it, or one somehow gets hacked in later > (like the javadoc conventions). In a few cases (like the Adobe formats) > that metadata is expressed in RDF. We have RDF - it can already express metadata! > When people publish an RDF dataset, aren't they going to want to do the > same thing? Dunno - maybe they are just putting a collection of graphs on the web and linking to it (e.g. N-Quads dumps). The "what it is" and "where it came from" is out-of-band e.g. on the web page linking to the file. > Yes, sometimes you can just throw that metadata into a named graph, but > what if (a) you don't get a chance to tell the consumer which named > graph you put it in, and (b) some named graphs are opaque/untrustred, > perhaps because they contain old information or information from other > souces (eg a Web Crawl). (While these might not be the cases you work > with, it seems to me they'll be quite common if this syntax ever catches > on.) > > Folks who are not convinced we need a metadata mechanism -- how do you > imagine solving this problem? How can someone reading a serialized > dataset figure out which triples are the metadata? Can't they look for it with a query? SELECT * { GRAPH ?g { :s rdf:type :metadataRecord } } although the unnamed graph is a good place to put it IMO. Just don't invent a fixed name for the metagraph. Andy
Received on Wednesday, 26 September 2012 14:10:24 UTC