| [higgins-dev] Improving Higgins XDI syntax |
Whereas over the long haul there are lots of semantic changes [1] we'd like to make to the XDI that Higgins is exposing, in the very short term there is an urgent need to make it far less verbose and more developer/human friendly the XDI on a syntactic level. I'm concerned about the aesthetics and verbosity. Here is a sample of what Higgins is creating today: [2] (http://wiki.eclipse.org/Higgins_PDS_Access#XDI_Representation). I've collected here [3] some suggestions for how it could be improved. I repeat [3] here: The XDI below contains a repeated idiom for representing complex attributes (object-valued predicates) that is far more verbose than required. Every section represented like this: <xdi:xdi> <xdi:s xri="$value$hash$sha$256!f68f4bb3513a89c6ea41b6eeffe6af0ea2a7d2f3f172b72bf26ecb29d9713020"> <xdi:p xri="$value"> <xdi:data><![CDATA[urn:efa25e71-5b6f-4844-b139-4ed26dd1c3e5]]></xdi:data> </xdi:p> </xdi:s> </xdi:xdi> ...should be written like this: <xdi:ref xri="=(urn:efa25e71-5b6f-4844-b139-4ed26dd1c3e5)"/> Similarly, since in every case above there is only a single value for a literal, every section that looks like this: <xdi:p xri="+(http://www.w3.org/2006/vcard/ns#postal-code)"> <xdi:xdi> <xdi:s xri="$value$hash$sha$256!0a38e8a3c328b1616ac3c34720d0ceb578bd3f5e8bfff9841bb0804dd4d2b5eb"> <xdi:p xri="$value"> <xdi:data><![CDATA[55555-1234]]></xdi:data> </xdi:p> </xdi:s> </xdi:xdi> </xdi:p> ...should look like this: <xdi:p xri="+(http://www.w3.org/2006/vcard/ns#postal-code)"> <xdi:data><![CDATA[55555-1234]]></xdi:data> <-- Drummond/Markus please verify </xdi:p> Other Ideas *Should we be using the JSON serialization of XDI instead of the XML serialization? *It would be nice if XDI had a convention for URI shortening based on a default namespace. That if relative entityIDs were used (e.g. "#245") we wouldn't have to have these long entityIDs like this one used below: "urn:efa25e71-5b6f-4844-b139-4ed26dd1c3e5". * In addition to a default (per document) namespace, if arbitrary namespace definitions were allowed then instead of "http://www.w3.org/2006/vcard/ns#n" we could say "vcard:n" (where vcard="http://www.w3.org/2006/vcard/ns#") *The above example could be significantly shortened if it only described a single address (the second address doesn't have any illustrative value). For reference here is an RDF representation of a single persona (Contactable_1) and their address, name and telephone number. Some "cheating" is going on here: entityIDs have been hand-crafted to be pretty (e.g. :Address_1 vs. :efa25e71-5b6f-4844-b139-4ed26dd1c3e5): :Contactable_1 rdf:type p:Contactable ; p:role p:Buyer ; vcard:adr :Address_1 ; vcard:n :Name_1 ; vcard:tel Voice_1 . :Address_1 rdf:type vcard:Address ; vcard:extended-address "Suite 1000"^^xsd:string ; vcard:locality "Peoria"^^xsd:string ; vcard:postal-code "61604"^^xsd:string ; vcard:region "IL"^^xsd:string ; vcard:street-address "123 S Main Street"^^xsd:string . :Name_1 rdf:type vcard:Name ; rdfs:label "Name_1"^^xsd:string ; vcard:family-name "Jones"^^xsd:string ; vcard:given-name "Alice"^^xsd:string . :Voice_1 rdf:type vcard:Voice ; rdf:value "tel:+358-555-1234567" |