Re: EARL, Typed Node Elements and abbreviated syntax.

Hi,

EARL is RDF, and the "abbreviated syntax" is legal RDF equivalent to the  
"full syntax". (There are in fact other syntax variations that are  
possible, but since very few people are generating EARL, and in particular  
because so far few people are reading it and then handing on results they  
haven't appeared much. Yet.)

If you want to know which RDF tools can handle RDF you should run them  
against the RDF test suite (or look for EARL results that suggest that a  
particular library can handle RDF... Oh. EARL was in its long dark sleep  
when the RDF group were testing tools, so they made up their own thing  
instead. I guess it is easy enough to write a convertor).

The current draft EARL spec uses a number of things, including entity  
declarations, to try and make the syntax slightly more readable. Since RDF  
is a) meant for machines, not people, an b) about as readable in any form  
it apears in, the version I drafted that actually validates doesn't use  
the entity stuff. It means the document is longer, but it relies on fewer  
things being implemented in order to achieve interoperability.

So I think we should point out to developers who don't understand how RDF  
works that YES, the two versions (and several others) are equivalent, and  
they need to expect that.

I typically process EARL with CWM, which is happy to accept anything that  
in real RDF (and some stuff that isn't) although it generates a particular  
serialisation itself. I am prety sure that RAP, Raptor, Redland, Jena all  
have no problems dealing with the variety of RDF i it is valid. The  
ARP-based validator also gets it right, and shows the same graph for any  
partiular syntax you feed it.

Cheers

Chaals

On Tue, 08 Mar 2005 16:09:54 -0500, Nils Ulltveit-Moe <nils@u-moe.no>  
wrote:

>
> Hi
>
> Is the Typed Node Elements and abbreviated XML representation of EARL
> regarded as the norm, or is the more verbose rdf:Description XML
> representation regarded as equivalent?

> Seen from an RDF perspective, these two representations are equivalent.
>> From a human perspective, that seems strange. Especially for developers
> who have a superficial knowledge of RDF/XML and only wants to output the
> required strings to generate EARL.
>
> It would also be nice if the ERT tool register contained a register of
> EARL compliant libraries. Especially if EARL tools are required to be
> able to parse and then store the abbreviated and typed node syntax.


-- 
Charles McCathieNevile                      Fundacion Sidar
charles@sidar.org   +61 409 134 136    http://www.sidar.org

Received on Tuesday, 8 March 2005 22:47:09 UTC