S-Triples

Status

OBSOLETE/RENAMED/MOVED: see TODL instead.

Experimental. Instead of talking about using a modified N-Triples, we can talk about using S-Triples.

What

S-Triples is a language for serializing RDF graphs. It is the same as N-Triples except that it allows NodeIDs and literals to be subjects and predicates.

Why

Reason 1: simplicity.

Reason 2: symmetry.

Reason 3: closure under daml:EquivelentTo and such

Reason 4: closure under cwm-style rules

See irc discussion on the subject.

Issue: XML

I heard RDF-Core change N-Triples to have an XML-literal type, which may fit with their goal, but would be a serious design mistake for the applications I envision for S-Triples. So S-Triples does not have that, making it not a superset of N-Triples any more.

Issue: I18N, Binary Data

Are there internationalization issues? How do you do binary data? I think \uxx... works for everything, but does a "ab" denote a string, a sequence of two characters, a sequence of two numbers (97 and 98, the ASCII for "a" and "b"), or something else?

This matters if the mapping between numbers and characters is not stable. Printable ASCII is quite stable. Unicode is less so. For example imagine one version of Unicode7 has \Udeadbeef being a smiley face and in Unicode8 it's a frown. How does on print "Hello \Udeadbeef"?

Option 1: We specify we're using Unicode 3.2.0. If you want to use a different one, you have say so in triples. That is, you use a function which maps Unicode-3.2.0 strings into lists of numbers, and another function which maps to whatever other version you want. I think this is the way to go.

Option 2: We specify we're using Printable US-Ascii. \u0000 is just 6 characters. \n is two characters. If you want to get at other characters, you use an un-escape mapping.

... I'm sure there are other options.

See unicode versioning

Naming

Rename S-Triples as SWERL (Semantic Web Elemental Reference Language)? Or Mergable Binary Predicate Expression Language. Or Simple Resource Triple Format (SRTF), Simple Triple Format (STF), .... Simple Identifier Triple Formal. Minimal Description language. Simple Property-Statement Encoding Language. Simple Property-Statement Format (SPSF) with apologies to Peter F. Patel-Schneider.