Re: Awkward TriG compatibility with N3

Richard,

Thank you for your comment. I've recorded this as

https://www.w3.org/2011/rdf-wg/track/issues/174

	Andy

One comment inline:

On 17/11/13 19:09, Richard Smith wrote:
>
> Consider the following TriG document:
>
>    { ex:Jack a foaf:Person }
>    ex:foo { ex:Jill a foaf:Person }
>
> Assuming the prefixes are bound, this is valid TriG document.  The first
> line puts a statement that Jack is a person into the default graph, and
> the second line puts a similar statement about Jill into named graph
> ex:foo.
>
> But it's very nearly a valid N3 document meaning something quite
> different.  N3's formulae are conceptually much the same as TriG's
> graphs, but N3's formulae can be subject or object of statements.  So in
> N3, the following document makes some sort of statement (with predicate
> ex:foo) about the two formulae or graphs.
>
>    { ex:Jack a foaf:Person } ex:foo { ex:Jill a foaf:Person } .
>
> The only thing that stops that from being valid TriG is terminating
> '.'.  To express this in TriG we would write:
>
>    _:a { ex:Jack a foaf:Person }
>    _:b { ex:Jill a foaf:Person }
>    _:a ex:foo _b
>
> Now I can entirely understand TriG not wanting to support this feature
> of N3.  But at the same time I would be pleased if some future TriG-like
> language, maybe TriG 2.0, would include them because they're very useful
> in technologies like the W3C's PROV language where it's common to want
> to write:
>
>    { ex:Jack a foaf:Person ;
>              bio:birth [ dc:date "1905-01-11"^^xsd:date ] }
>        prov:wasDerivedFrom [ a foaf:Document,
>                              dc:title "Jack's birth certificate" ] .
>
> So it would be nice if TriG remained compatible with N3 by allowing for
> the future possibility of such a feature.
>
> Even though N3 is not a W3C recommendation, it (or a subset of it) is in
> use in several current products, such as cwm. Languages like N-Triples
> and Turtle are both compatible with N3 insofar as no valid N-Triples or
> Turtle document that is also a valid N3 document has different meanings
> in the different languages.  (They're not quite subsets of N3, but it
> would be easy enough to update N3 so that this were true.)  An
> application wishing to support N-Triples, Turtle and N3 may well do so
> with a single parser.
>
> Strictly speaking it is also the case that TriG and N3 because the final
> '.' disambiguates it, but then makes the grammar a long way from being
> LL(1) or LALR(1), as arbitrary look-ahead is required.  Allowing a
> single parser to handle both N3 and TriG easily is another reason why
> this syntax is problematic.
>
>
> If fixing this is considered desirable, requiring a '.' after the
> closing '}' of the native (i.e. non-SPARQL) syntax would do this.  (This
> would require trival ammendments to grammar productions [2g] block and
> [3g] triplesOrGraph.) But it does so at the cost of breaking
> compatibility with the current (and earlier) drafts of TriG.  This has a
> pleasing symmetry with the Turtle syntax for anonymous blank nodes or
> collections:
>
>    ( ex:a ex:b ) .
>    [ a ex:class ] .
>    { ex:foo ex:pred ex:bar } .
>
> which generate the following (slightly abbreviated) N-Quads:
>
>    <>   _:1     rdf:type   rdf:List .
>    <>   _:1     rdf:first  ex:a     .
>    <>   _:1     rdf:rest   _:2      .
>    <>   _:2     rdf:first  ex:b     .
>    <>   _:2     rdf:rest   rdf:nil  .
>    <>   _:3     rdf:type   ex:class .
>    _:4  ex:foo  ex:pred    ex:bar   .

This is not quite right.  The final line is a triple:

ex:foo  ex:pred    ex:bar   .

The default graph is not a named graph with a blank node.


>
>
> Richard
>

Received on Monday, 18 November 2013 10:30:22 UTC