Possible error in "optional properties" for Template Specifications: source

[6a6d74]

The optional property source specified as an optional Template Specification property says:

"""
[...] If the value is "rdf", it should similarly first be transformed to XML based on the simple mapping defined in Generating RDF from Tabular Data on the Web.
"""

Really? We could transform to RDF/XML but this seems somewhat over prescriptive as each implementation may have a preferred RDF serialisation.

In fact, would it not just be better to specify the media type of the source - which would cater for the wide number of RDF serialisations.

• application/json
• application/rdf+xml
• text/turtle
• application/n-triples
• application/ld+json

... and maybe XML serialisations too (should we get that far).

[iherman]

+1. It is up to the (template) implementation to see what format it can accept in the first place.

Ivan

On 01 Dec 2014, at 14:35 , Jeremy Tandy notifications@github.com wrote:

The optional property source specified as an optional Template Specification property says:

"""
[...] If the value is "rdf", it should similarly first be transformed to XML based on the simple mapping defined in Generating RDF from Tabular Data on the Web.
"""

Really? We could transform to RDF/XML but this seems somewhat over prescriptive as each implementation may have a preferred RDF serialisation.

In fact, would it not just be better to specify the media type of the source - which would cater for the wide number of RDF serialisations.

• application/json
• application/rdf+xml
• text/turtle
• application/n-triples
• application/ld+json
... and maybe XML serialisations too (should we get that far).

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Ivan Herman, W3C
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[6a6d74]

Is it even conceivable that a Template might want to work on the original CSV text? Possibly - but not an item for discussion right now.

[iherman]

On 02 Dec 2014, at 13:55 , Jeremy Tandy notifications@github.com wrote:

Is it even conceivable that a Template might want to work on the original CSV text? Possibly - but not an item for discussion right now.

I would not even consider that. All our methods and work rely on the abstract data model, we should not open the door for anything else imho.

Ivan

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Ivan Herman, W3C
Digital Publishing Activity Lead
Home: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/
mobile: +31-641044153
ORCID ID: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0782-2704

[JeniT]

The reference to 'XML' was a typo which I've just fixed, sorry.

@iherman when we discussed this at the TPAC F2F we agreed that it was useful to say that a particular template would operate over the JSON or RDF graph version of the data. This was to enable eg the supply of a Javascript script to operate over something that makes sense to it, or a SPARQL CONSTRUCT query to operate over the RDF graph. It's not necessarily a literal writing out of those files (which is what would be implied by the use of a particular media type, @6a6d74).

Proposed resolution: We keep the text as is (with the typo fixed!)

[iherman]

The current text is still ambiguous to me. A value of rdf for the value of source means falling back to csv2rdf. However, the csv2rdf defines a transformation in terms of conceptual RDF triples, not in terms of a particular serialization. I would think that the spec should refer to the media types for rdf serializations (implementations may use the rdf value if they 'bind' the template to an internal, non-standard representation of an RDF graph, eg, an RDFLib Graph object when using Python).

Ivan

On 04 Feb 2015, at 15:42 , Jeni Tennison notifications@github.com wrote:

The reference to 'XML' was a typo which I've just fixed, sorry.

@iherman when we discussed this at the TPAC F2F we agreed that it was useful to say that a particular template would operate over the JSON or RDF graph version of the data. This was to enable eg the supply of a Javascript script to operate over something that makes sense to it, or a SPARQL CONSTRUCT query to operate over the RDF graph. It's not necessarily a literal writing out of those files (which is what would be implied by the use of a particular media type, @6a6d74).

Proposed resolution: We keep the text as is (with the typo fixed!)

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Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

---

Ivan Herman, W3C
Digital Publishing Activity Lead
Home: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/
mobile: +31-641044153
ORCID ID: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0782-2704

[JeniT]

Resolved at F2F. source will be either rdf or json, referring to the in-memory representation of the result of the conversion; there's no serialisation going on.