Re: [tm-pubsubj-comment] Re: A Common Graph Syntax?

[Murray Altheim <m.altheim@open.ac.uk>]

Eric Miller wrote:

> On Mon, 2002-07-01 at 06:41, Murray Altheim wrote:
> 
> 
>>few known difficulties (such as a lack of xmlns declaration). If RDF
>>were expressed in GXL, it's not too far a leap to express XTM in GXL.
> 
> Thanks Murry for the suggestions. A common syntactic expression was not
> necessarily at the core of my earlier post (rather on deployment, best
> practice, etc.). However your above mentioned sentiment may provide a
> interesting experiment in RDF/XML and XTM interoperability if anyone is
> willing to try.


Well, we've both probably seen a few projects where syntax came first,
model later, but given that in a community of developers the syntax is
really where the rubber meets the road, "working code" is (as I seem
to see you agree, from your challenge) always means that *somebody*
understood, at least to themselves, a way of implementing a working
application. Warts and all, this iterative process is how we got to
HTML 4.0 and now XHTML.


> context... I'm still looking for a response on on what an application
> would see if they dereferenced one of these PSI's
> http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/tm-pubsubj-comment/200205/msg00046.html


For myself, I seldom dereference a PSI, merely using the URI string
as an identifier, so this kind of thing isn't a path I've travelled down.


[...]
> N-Triples is a line-based, plain text format for encoding an RDF graph. 
> 
> The RDF/NT expression of the above example can be found at
> http://www.w3.org/2002/05/29-psi/fruit.nt


Looks interesting -- it doesn't appear that it'd be difficult to
translate this to GXL.  I've been authoring topic maps in Linear
Topic Map notation, and have also developed a means of authoring
web pages from a simple syntax I've developed, called Augmented
Plain Text (APT), so I'm all for creating simple authoring syntaxes.
If there are any Java-based tools for translating RDF (or perhaps
DAML+OIL) into N-Triples, and perhaps a specification of some sort,
I'd appreciate a reference. I didn't see anything on the W3C
Technical Reports page.


> Anyone interested in trying to represent any simple XTM instance data in
> terms of this simple graph bases serialization as an exercises in
> convergence?


I'm unfortunately a bit overtaxed in keeping up with my reading and
getting my Ph.D. project off the ground, but I'll certainly consider
this further. Having the ability to visualize RDF from N-Triples would
be likely easier than doing so with DAML-OIL, for example, so the idea
is appealing. (I have an LTM/XTM to TouchGraph visualizer running,
with some minimal experimentation with GXL too)

Murray

......................................................................
Murray Altheim                  <http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/murray/>
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK

      In the evening
      The rice leaves in the garden
      Rustle in the autumn wind
      That blows through my reed hut.  -- Minamoto no Tsunenobu