Re: Proposal: "Canonical" RDF/XML

Charles McCathieNevile wrote:
> Ergh. I get the feeling I am not explaining this very clearly, or I am
> missing something fundamental.

Same for me :-)

> On Sun, 29 Jun 2003, Benja Fallenstein wrote:
>>Hm, I don't think that I want the file we keep in CVS to be a
>>task-specific XML form of the RDF data. Again, I see how task-specific
>>XML can be useful when "working with it," but I think that my use case
>>is more about "keeping it." I would definitely not want to change my
>>canonicalization tool and adapt it to a new XML schema each time I want
>>to use a new vocabulary in my RDF.
> 
> 
> No, I don't want to keep the XML - the tools write it out and 'turn the XML
> into RDF' (most trivially by sticking it into rdf:RDF tags...)

Yeah, but I *do* (in CVS) and I think that's exactly what makes your 
approach not suited to my problem :-)

It's the CVS doing the diffs/merges, internally, on the .rdf file I put 
into the repository, after all...

>>(BTW, I also have a second, related, and to me actually more important
>>use case: Identifying versions of RDF graphs by cryptographic hashes, so
>>that I can reconstruct a version using diffs and then check it against
>>the hash. -- Hm, I think I mentioned this once before on this list,
>>months ago *scratches head* (anyway) :-) )
> 
> for that you just need a serialisation that you can check,

Agree.

> and your proposal makes sense.

Ok.

> (I presume you specifically want to use diff rather than a
> triple-wise diff that understands blank node IDs...)

Actually, I do want to use triple-wise diff for this purpose. :-) But 
after applying these triple-diffs, I have an RDF graph, and to check 
that against the hash I need my canonical serialization :)

>>>I collect data mixing foaf information about who knows who, what they are
>>>interested in and working on with information about what languages they
>>>speak, stuff about where they are when, (both in generic location and in
>>>terms of attending events), what they look like, and perhaps a few other
>>>things.
>>
>>Sounds interesting -- out of curiosity: is there a practical application
>>you have in mind for this or is it mostly just for fun? :-)
> 
> I started doing it for fun (because my friends were). Then I discovered I
> wanted to find out what a person looked like (because I was trying to find
> them at a conference), and that I was wondering if there is a danish-speaking
> person interested in the semantic web, around copenhagen. (not surprisingly,
> there is. Even better, the semantic web told me so...)

Fun!

> the xform stuff is at
> http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/200305/foaflang/xforms/ if you're
> interested.

I am. The URI doesn't work for me though (404). The parent works, tho--

     http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/200305/foaflang/

- Benja

Received on Sunday, 29 June 2003 12:39:27 UTC