[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RDF/XML Syntax Working Draft 2002-11-08 Published
I'm pleased to announce that the W3C RDF Core Working Group has published a new version of the RDF/XML working draft revising the syntax originally specified in the RDF Model and Syntax W3C Recommendation. RDF/XML Syntax Specification (Revised), edited by Dave Beckett W3C Working Draft 8 November 2002 (published 2002-11-12) http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-rdf-syntax-grammar-20021108/ This syntax re-specifies the original grammar in terms of XML, XML Namespaces, the XML Information Set including support for XML Base. The main changes from the previous 25 March 2002 draft are as follows. I've added some comments for background, but there are lots of links in the document to the issues and discussion. * Section 2 "An XML syntax for RDF" expanded with many more examples. This is an attempt to explain the RDF/XML syntax including the many (too many) forms of abbreviation in RDF/XML with the use of examples. We don't suggest you use all of them. We have had the suggestion that we describe a simple profile that you can stick to if you don't care. This might end up similar to the approach Adobe did with their use of RDF/XML in XMP, which has been described as RDF/XML-7 - they don't use 7 forms of the abbreviation We particularly ask for feedback on this section since it has a lot of new words and examples, We need to know if this section helps. The feedback address is at the top the document, where the archived comments can be read too. * RDF typed literals added using a new rdf:datatype attribute. So now you can mark literals as being of type XSD integer, for example. This new term is explained more in the RDF Concepts and Abstract Syntax working draft at http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-concepts/#dfn-typed-literal * rdf:nodeID attribute added to allow referencing of blank nodes. This makes going between RDF graphs to/from RDF/XML a lot easier. The main caveat is property URI-references that can't be written as XML Qnames. More detail is given on this at http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-syntax-grammar/#section-Serialising * rdf:parseType="Collection" added for collections of nodes. This is modeled after daml:Collection in the DAML+OIL syntax (based on RDF/XML), generating a lisp-like triple structure of rdf:first, rdf:rest, rdf:nil etc. The Web Ontology Working Group and others asked for this. It hopefully will makes things easier for OWL and in general, inferencing over or describing such structures in triples. * Some non-namespaced attributes were returned to the grammar: ID, bagID, about, resource, parseType or type This makes a lot of existing RDF/XML work without warnings but apart from them, in particular we wanted to ensure that the Adobe XMP profile of RDF/XML and that used in Mozilla remained valid. The detailed changes to the document are recorded at http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-rdf-syntax-grammar-20021108/#section-Changes These syntax changes are already being implemented in parsers for several languages (so you probably won't have to), and I'm expecting there will be several (3-4) 90%+ done quite soon. To help with this there is a set of test cases with N-Triples test format described in http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-testcases/ and the tests themselves at http://www.w3.org/2000/10/rdf-tests/rdfcore/ that we will be using to help with this. Cheers Dave
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