Re: [closed] Re: N-Triples VS RDF/XML bNode identifiers

At 09:54 30/10/03 -0600, pat hayes wrote:
>I hope it isn't considered acceptable. Our syntax is constrained by N3??? 
>That is news to me and I think it is ridiculous. N3 isnt even properly 
>defined anywhere, it is not a standard and it has virtually a nonexistent 
>user community outside the W3C itself. I bear the N3 developers no 
>ill-will, but it is insane for us to be constraining our syntax (and 
>inconveniencing our potential users) because of undocumented syntactic 
>vagaries of a few hackers.

Pat, I think the point here is precisely that we are *not* constraining the 
recommended interoperable syntax for RDF (i.e. RDF/XML) by N3, or 
N-triples, or any other syntax.  bNode identifiers, where used, are 
explicitly specific to particular syntactic representations of RDF.

N-triples was clearly *not* intended to be a general-use syntax for RDF 
(and the I18N folks would have given us a much harder time about it if we 
hadn't been clear about that), but just an easy-to-process form for test 
cases.  (It's relationship to N3 is one of the things that made it 
easy-to-process, because of tool availability).

One can certainly argue, as you do, that it might be *convenient* for bnode 
identifier syntax to be consistent across RDF syntaxes, but I think it's 
clearly not *necessary*, and at this stage of the game to make any 
unnecessary change is not desirable.

#g


------------
Graham Klyne
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Received on Friday, 31 October 2003 06:32:58 UTC