Re: RDFa API - Collections / List

Mark Birbeck wrote:
> I agree with Ivan's comments, and would also add that the reason we
> have avoided putting anything to do with lists and collections into
> RDFa is that there is no consensus in the RDF community on the best
> way to do them. It would have been very easy to make use of ol, ul and
> li...but to generate what? alt, seq and bag are rarely
> used...rdf:first, rdf:rest and rdf:nil don't have unanimous
> support...it's really not clear what we should do.

shame, this is something that should probably be nailed sooner rather 
than later, hopefully this will be addressed soon :)

> By the way, the main reason that the RDFa spec talks about triples
> being generated in the 'default graph' is to allow for experimentation
> to take place by using additional graphs.
> 
> So if you wanted to generate rdf:first, rdf:rest and rdf:nil --
> perhaps derived from <ol> and <ul> -- then provided your parser placed
> these triples into a separate graph it would still be fully
> conformant. Obviously you'd need to provide a way for developers to
> get those triples, but that wouldn't be that difficult.
> 
> (The RDFa API should support this, but there has been some reluctance
> to get down to the graph level in the API...we might need to revisit
> that.)

If you think of a DataStore as a graph, there's no reason why you can't 
simply run a document through different parsers and in to different 
store - the API is really flexible this way.. one of the many ways of 
writing it would be

   var lists = data.createStore();
   new RDFaListParser(data.context).parse(document, lists);

I'm unsure whether the best approach is to have one parser using one 
store, or one parser producing multiple stores (graphs) and providing 
access to them - that's the functional programmer in me battling the OO 
programmer though!

Best,

Nathan

Received on Tuesday, 12 October 2010 09:47:33 UTC