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The Translate Menu

The Translate Menu is used to translate the current Metalog discourse into N-triples or RDF/XML.

The first two options ("Assertions to N-triples") translate the assertions of the current discourse to the corresponding N-triple format. This is handy to export Metalog discourses to other applications, for example, or to study how information is represented at low level in Metalog. These two options differ for the fact they allow to either translate "annotations" or not. In particular:

Assertions to N-triples (with Annotations) :
This option translates to N-triples also with "annotations", that roughly speaking are the corresponding, at N-triples level, of the representations. This results in a slightly larger N-triples file, but the advantage is that the appropriate representations can be passed onto other applications (or, for example, sent over the Internet), and re-created on the other side.
Assertions to N-triples (with Annotations) :
This option behaves exactly like the previous option, just omitting the annotations part. The corresponding N-triple file will be therefore smaller than with the first option. Note that no loss of meaning occurs with this option: in other words, no semantics is lost. Just, it will be essentially impossible to re-create the appropriate representations from the translated N-triple file, which means that if the Metalog PNL (or other similar user-friendly tools) are used, the resulting output will be harder to read and understand.

The third option, Assertions to RDF/XML (no Metalog extensions), translates the assertions of the current Metalog file to the XML syntax for RDF. In the current version, this is limited to files that don't have Metalog extensions ("pure RDF", so to say). This limitation will be likely lifted in a subsequent version: for the moment, just note that this is not essential, as the user can translate any Metalog discourse to N-triples, and then use other public domain tools that take N-triples and output RDF/XML (or, that directly import N-triples). In other words, the goal of interoperability and import/export is already fulfilled by the easier N-triples format.

The remaining three options are:

These are in all similar to the first three options, with the only difference that, this time, just the query part of the Metalog discourse is considered, while all the assertions are ignored.