Re: Turtle implementation report for RDF::Trine

Dave,

Another follow-up on this issue:

On Apr 17, 2013, at 10:22 PM, David Wood <david@3roundstones.com> wrote:

> There is a note in ISSUE-1 that shows that the SPARQL 1.1 syntax was "practically frozen" by the time the RDF working group was established (23 Feb 2011, 16:28:05).  Unfortunately for Turtle syntax, we had very little ability to change SPARQL.
> 
> There is also a note that the working group resolved that SPARQL and Turtle syntax should be "the same except for well-motivated (and small) exceptions." (resolved at 13 Oct 2011, 17:24:43 UTC)
> 
> Both of those notes suggest @prefix and PREFIX syntax alignment.

The early discussion of ISSUE-1 seems to be only about the triple(-pattern) syntaxes of Turtle and SPARQL. In fact, Richard Cyganiak brought this up explicitly by saying "The resolution wast that the *triple pattern syntax* should be the same … This shouldn't be understood to include BASE and PREFIX, I think" [1]. Which got agreement from at least Sandro[2]. At some point people started discussing PREFIX and BASE again, but it's not clear to me that any resolution of ISSUE-1 or its motivation that triple-pattern syntaxes be aligned should have bearing on this issue.

I certainly don't think that arguing that the WG resolution to align the triple pattern syntaxes should outweigh what is, in my opinion, a valid technical and usability argument against having two separate syntaxes for PREFIX and BASE. Especially when there wasn't exactly overwhelming support for adding this to the spec to begin with. Looking at the 16 May 2012 minutes[3], I see 11 of 17 abstaining (0) votes, 3 votes for (with an additional +0.2) and 2 votes against (-0.999 and -0.7). (I'm not going to try to parse the difference between people's using signed zeros.)

thanks,
.greg


[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-wg/2012May/0339.html
[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-wg/2012May/0341.html
[3] http://www.w3.org/2011/rdf-wg/meeting/2012-05-16#resolution_2

Received on Thursday, 25 April 2013 09:23:30 UTC