[redland-dev] Abbreviating URIs in XML Attribute Values

[David Phillips]

Hi Nick,

Thanks for the response.

I'm working in a context where there is lots of ontology authoring.
Many people use Protege for this purpose.  As far as I can tell, all
OWL that's generated from Protege uses this idiom of abbreviating URIs
in attribute values with custom entities.  I've never really come
across it in other contexts.  I just figured that, given Protege's
popularity in the semantic web world, there might be a chance that
others would be using the same idiom.

The system I'm working on generates both rdfxml and turtle.  The
latter is definitely to be preferred when size and human readability
matter.  Still though, I wouldn't mind getting my rdfxml to be as
minimal as possible.

Thanks again.

-Dave


On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 4:24 AM, Nicholas J Humfrey <njh at aelius.com> wrote:
> Hello Dave,
>
> I do not believe that using custom XML entities in RDF/XML is very common - or at least I havn't seen it for a long time.
>
> I am also unaware of anything in libraptor to allow you to do this.
>
> If it is of any help, Turtle is a lot more concise than RDF/XML.
>
> nick.
>
>
> On 16 Jun 2011, at 14:00, David Phillips <dphillips at janya.com> wrote:
>
>> Hello.
>>
>> I'm trying to get my RDF to be as little bloated as possible.  One way
>> of doing this is by setting namespaces on the RDF serializer.  But the
>> XML namespace spec only covers XML elements and XML attribute names.
>> It does not cover XML attribute values.  That is, you can't use a
>> qname in a context such as:
>>
>> <element attname="prefix:localname" />
>>
>> However, I've come across XML documents (in particular, OWL
>> ontologies) which have the following:
>>
>> <element attname="&prefix;localname" />
>>
>> Instead of the prefix being defined with a namespace declaration it's
>> defined with an entity declaration in the document's DOCTYPE.
>>
>> My question is: Is there any way of getting a librdf serializer to
>> generate RDF with this sort of abbreviated attribute values?
>>
>> Thanks in advance!
>>
>> -Dave Phillips
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>