- From: Aaron Swartz <me@aaronsw.com>
- Date: Sat, 21 Jul 2001 22:27:10 -0500
- To: w3c-rdfcore-wg@w3.org
To be quite honest I'm getting a bit tired of arguing over the N-Triples syntax, but I thought I'd throw this out there. Today I came up with the idea that we could define anonymous nodes as having a special representation in the abstract syntax, but define the N-Triples conversion from RDF as having a well-defined set of names for them. IOW, an algorithm such as the one used by SiRPAC or CARA to generate anonymous nodes in order could be specified somehow (using XSLT, for example), and all RDF/XML parsers which outputted N-Triples could follow this specification. That way, comparison of N-Triples documents could be reduced to a simple sort/diff operation, while still retaining the semantics of anonymous nodes. An example: <rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"> <rdf:Description> <rdf:value>foo</rdf:value> </rdf:Description> </rdf:RDF> could be unambiguously defined as: _:g0 rdf:value "foo" . as parsers would use anonymous node names in the form of _:gn where n begins at zero and increments for each anonymous node reached in the XML. Obviously this wouldn't work for N-Triples output from a data in which ordering information had been lost (I have some ideas on that one too, but they are less formed) but it would work for any RDF/XML -> N-Triples conversion. Another option would be to use the number of the element from which the anonymous node occurs. In this case the number would be 2, as the <rdf:Description> is the second element in the document. This seems to give the best of both worlds. Thoughts? -- "Aaron Swartz" | Blogspace <mailto:me@aaronsw.com> | <http://blogspace.com/about/> <http://www.aaronsw.com/> | weaving the two-way web
Received on Saturday, 21 July 2001 23:27:12 UTC