A couple of weeks ago I make Ping the Semantic Web detecting and indexing RDF documents serialized using N3. Now I took a part of yesterday to serialize Talk Digger’s content using N3 as well.

So Talk Digger now export most of the relations it knows in RDF using 10 ontologies: SIOC, FOAF, GEO, BIO, DC, CONTENT, DCTERMS, DC, ADMIN, RSS and serialized with two languages: XML and N3. Check at the bottom of each conversation page, or user page, and you will see SIOC and FOAF RDF documents serialized in both XML and N3.

I started to play with N3 serialization when I implemented it in Ping the Semantic Web. At first I was telling me: why another serialization method, why confusing users and developers with yet another way to write things?

Then I found my answer: N3 is basically a simplified teaching language used to express RDF documents (so, to serialize) developed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Once you get the basis of the language, you can easily read and write RDF documents in an elegant way. The parsing of N3 documents is much easier than its counter part (XML).

This serialization language gain to get know and its adoption would certainly encourage the usage of RDF by the fact that developers could concentrate their efforts on the RDF documents instead of the way they are serialized (there are so many ways to serialize something in RDF using XML; sometime I wonder if it is bounded and boundless…).

 

There are some links to getting started with N3:

Primer: Getting into RDF & Semantic Web using N3
Notation 3: An readable language for data on the Web
Turtle – Terse RDF Triple Language

Technorati: n3 | n3turtle | rdf | xml | semantic | web | talkdigger | pingthesemanticweb | ping | document | file
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