Re: Turtle - Terse RDF Triple Language updated

On 3 Oct 2007, at 16:05, Dave Beckett wrote:

> 1) It's a specific vocabulary burnt in. 'a' should be the only one.

You already have lists ( ), which stands for at least three relations  
(first, next, nill and a class)

> 2) It is not in SPARQL's triple syntax.

Ok, though perhaps it would be interesting to think wether it should be.

> 3) I am trying to stabilise Turtle by not adding new syntax now.

ok.

> 4) It means two things; an abbreviation for owl:sameAs and naming
>    a blank node.  If I understand it correctly. This seems bad.

I can already name a blank node with owl:sameAs. There is nothing  
wrong with that.
Well apart from it being wrong to think of it as naming a blank node.  
We just have two ways to refer to some thing:

   - the blank node
   - the URL


Clearly it is more interesting for the processor to keep the URL and  
forget the blank node, since you can do a lot more with the URL. But  
that is just pragmatics.

As far as people typing things go, and Turtle and N3 are meant for  
us, otherwise we would just use rdf/xml
I find it a lot clearer to bring properties related to a thing  
together. Otherwise you have to go hunting through the page to look  
for properties. URLs don't always make a lot of sense by themselves.

So in http://bblfish.net/people/henry/card.n3 which is quite a long  
file you will find

:me foaf:knows [ owl:sameAs <http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/#me>;
                  a foaf:Person;
                  foaf:name "Dan Connolly" ] .

That saves me having to look around the file for the info, and it  
also save me having to type a URL twice, which is more likely to  
cause a bug.

If I don't do that I would have to write

:me foaf:knows <http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/#me>.
<http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/#me> a foaf:Person;
                                         foaf:name "Dan Connolly"  .

Which as you see is not as clear, especially if the 2nd and 3rd  
sentences are on the other side of a file, which they will be if we  
are to make use of all the other niceties like ";" and "," and ( ).  
Without the convenience of
[ owl:sameAs ...] which is completely legal, it is impossible to  
bring information together coherently.

I have found the same thing would be quite useful in SPARQL too btw.

Henry


Home page: http://bblfish.net/
Sun Blog: http://blogs.sun.com/bblfish/
Foaf name: http://bblfish.net/people/henry/card#me