I am currently working on scripts that produce large amounts of Turtle (N3). I can write these scripts at 10X the speed I could write XML based stuff and can open the results in Protege. I therefore love Turtle.

Whenever I need to utter a triple I more or less just

echo "<$subject> <$predicate> <$object> . \n";

or

echo "<$subject> <$predicate> "$object" . \n";

for literals. No thought about document order or pushing and popping off stacks or holding XML libraries in memory etc. In fact no use of libraries at all!

There are loads of Turtle parsers around. For example:

http://arc.semsol.org/ http://www.seasr.org/wp-content/plugins/meandre/rdfapi-php/doc/ http://www.kanzaki.com/works/2006/misc/0308turtle.html

It would be very easy to write a Turtle -> RDF/XML converter but you might not like the document structures produced. Just take each line of the Turtle file and echo a single triple statement in RDF/XML. Come to think of it I could hack my scripts to produce this form of RDF/XML but it would just bloat the results by 100%.

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.)

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 100 Morrissey Blvd Boston, MA 02125-3390 Associate, Harvard University Herbaria email: ram@cs.umb.edu web: http://bdei.cs.umb.edu/ web: http://etaxonomy.org/FilteredPush http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram phone (+1)617 287 6466 _______________________________________________ tdwg-tag mailing list tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag

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Dear TDWG-persons,

I note that DwC "scientificName" as defined at http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/#scientificName is supposed to include authorship, however this can also be supplied separately in the field "scientificNameAuthorship". Under that scenario, should authorship be also included in the scientificName field, or omitted?

I can see arguments either way for this - if the authorship is included in the same field as the rest of the scientific name, then that single value is more meaningful and better for e.g. homonym disambiguation. On the other hand, it then requires parsing to get the scientific name without the authority, which if done incorrectly could introduce errors.

Any advice from the persons designing or using this field for data exchange would be appreciated.

Regards - Tony

Tony Rees Manager, Divisional Data Centre, CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research, GPO Box 1538, Hobart, Tasmania 7001, Australia Ph: 0362 325318 (Int: +61 362 325318) Fax: 0362 325000 (Int: +61 362 325000) e-mail: Tony.Rees@csiro.aumailto:Tony.Rees@csiro.au Manager, OBIS Australia regional node, http://www.obis.org.au/ Biodiversity informatics research activities: http://www.cmar.csiro.au/datacentre/biodiversity.htm Personal info: http://www.fishbase.org/collaborators/collaboratorsummary.cfm?id=1566