Roger,


On 25 Jan 2010, at 08:52, Roger Hyam wrote:

I think RDF/XML as a default return syntax is fine but Turtle definitely has its place.

Just my thoughts (rants)

Roger

(Rod. You must be writing brittle code if you rely on document structure (XPaths) to pull stuff out of RDF/XML because the syntax could change any time.)


Brittle is the only kind of code I know ;) Given that most RDF in our field is flat, and the namespaces are well documented, RDF/XML  doesn't strike me as more brittle. Any consuming code will have to change if the vocabulary changes, for example.

Rod






On 24 Jan 2010, at 11:51, Roderic Page wrote:

I agree with Kevin. XML may be verbose, but there are lots of tools for processing it, virtually none for N3.

For example, if I harvest RDF by resolving a LSID, I can use XPath to extract the bits I'm interested in, and programming languages such as PHP support this out of the box. Likewise for providers, there are tools that ensure the XML being output is valid.

Personally, if you're looking for an alternative to XML, N3 isn't the answer (that'd be JSON).

Regards

Rod

On 24 Jan 2010, at 02:25, Kevin Richards wrote:

I like the sound of the 'compactness' of the format, but I worry that there is a lack of tools that support the format (ie browsers, mainly). It is quite nice to naturally navigate the rdf world with a standard browser.  But for transfer standards, I suppose this wouldn't matter.

Kevin

Sent from my HTC

----- Reply message -----
From: "Bob Morris" <morris.bob@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, Jan 24, 2010 12:08 PM
Subject: [tdwg-tag] RDF N3
To: "Technical Architecture Group mailing list" <Tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org>

Let's make N3 be the recommended RDF representation. It is way more
compact and human readable than RDF/XML.  We could even specify a
normative conversion tool if necessary.


-- 
Robert A. Morris
Professor of Computer Science (nominally retired)
UMASS-Boston
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web: http://bdei.cs.umb.edu/
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http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram
phone (+1)617 287 6466
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---------------------------------------------------------
Roderic Page
Professor of Taxonomy
DEEB, FBLS
Graham Kerr Building
University of Glasgow
Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK

Tel: +44 141 330 4778
Fax: +44 141 330 2792