Monday, July 26, 2004

N3 Reading
Not a lot to talk about today.

The N3 export is now working, after taking longer than I expected. Part of the effort (and this includes Friday) involved changing some of the exporting code to handle multiple export modules. This was a little further reaching than I thought, since the original code was heavily tied to class implementations without any use of interfaces. Note to self: have a chat about it to RT.

I should mention that RT is still very new at coding, so he's still learning a lot. However, this was my first real opportunity to go through his code, and overall I'm impressed. Better than I was at his age.

After a little more discussion on the command to be used for exporting, AN and TJ confirmed that it should definitely be based on the backup. Whether or not this is the cleanest thing to do, it means that the iTQL language does not need to be changed significantly, which in turn restricts the modifications to the documentation, tests, and training material for TKS. I have to admit that this alone makes it the right way to go.

At the moment the type of export is entirely based on the filename extension. Files are assumed to be for N3 format if they end in ".n3" or ".nt". As a compromise, a future extension will add a modifier to the backup command which allows an override of the file format.

N3 Writing
I'm now partway through N3 importing. I'm expecting to hook in an N3 reader and not have to do a lot more, but I've yet to see if it will be that simple. For a start, the N3 reader was not where I expected to see it, so I'm still hunting for it. More importantly I don't know if it will import blank nodes correctly.

Blank nodes are currently being exported in a format of: <_node##>. Since there is no standard for this in N3 (or am I wrong there?) then I'm happy to leave it like this. I'm just going to have to make sure that they get loaded correctly. If I can't make an importing module read this correctly then it won't be difficult to load the N3 myself. That's one of the big advantages of the format.

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