Re: Media types for RDF.

Toby Inkster wrote:
> The question of proper, official media types for various serialisations
> of RDF came up on #swig (IRC) again today.
> 
> What needs to be done to progress the registration of "text/n3" and
> "text/turtle" which was discussed back in 2007/2008?
> 
>  http://www.w3.org/2008/01/rdf-media-types
> 
> Right now the situation's a mess. The media types used by publishers,
> and supported by consumers, are of such a variety that content
> negotiation between them ends up as a lucky dip. I am surprised at the
> lack of momentum for getting these standardised.

There's no process for W3C to do track this as far as I see and the process
from the IETF side is rather opaque to me, apart from email the ietf-types
list for advice/feedback, which does not seem to be authoritative.

> Once the registration is official, we should also submit a patch to the
> Apache httpd project to get common file suffixes for RDF serialisations
> into the Apache default configuration files. Currently ".rdf" is there
> for RDF/XML. 

Yes, it got added since RDF/XML registration was approved by IETF types and
the Apache project made the change.

> It would be handy to add:
> 
> AddType application/rdf+xml .owl

A bad idea I think, format should have one mime type.

(Aside #1: Alternative:  have app/rdf+xml+owl or app/rdf+xml+owl[1-8] for
each of the 3 OWL1 & 5? OWL2 varieties, if you must.  Mixing the
vocabularies in with the formats is a mistake, where do FOAF, DC, RDFS, ...
and versions of those get recorded?  Summary: don't go there.
)

> AddType text/n3 .n3
> AddType text/turtle .ttl
> AddType text/plain .nt  # Or maybe use text/turtle here too?

It would be good to get the turtle one done.  The major subtlety here is
default encoding.  N-Triples is always ASCII, Turtle is always UTF-8. So
text/plain is fine for .nt and it does not need a registration.

(see http://www.w3.org/TeamSubmission/2008/SUBM-turtle-20080114/#sec-mediaReg
)

Aside #2 - I think it's about time for an updated Turtle to fix typos,
clarifications.  So maybe we can ask again at that point.

Dave

Received on Friday, 21 August 2009 15:05:35 UTC