Greetings tech team - I pinged Matt and Liang on the proposal for using JSON. Attached is Liang's reply. He makes some good points on the choice of formats for SPDX 2.0.
Gary From: Liang Cao [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, February 10, 2014 7:47 AM To: Matt Germonprez Cc: Gary O'Neall Subject: Re: FW: translating RDF-XML to Turtle (N3) or JSON format Hi Gary, Thank you very much for the email and explanation:) Yes, you are right about JSON in FOSSology/SPDX module that it is only used as internal data transfer format. As Dr. Matt mentioned, we transfer file level and license information form FOSSology scanning to Yocto project by JSON format to generate SPDX documents in Yocto project. The SPDX output at UNO end is Tag format. I agree with you that the current Tag format can not represent hierarchy between objects, however, I still see the strong benefit of human readable plain text in Tag format(SPDX doc and package level information is much easier to read by users in Tag format). If new Tag format could represent hierarchy(like proposed "hasFile" or similarly "this file belong to **package" association), it still is a good way for human users. For the potential machine process(like transfer SPDX data to Dashboard to represent/search SPDX data on WEB interface), I think JSON format may be a choice. As our experience in Yocto+SPDX project, JSON is a good format to transfer data and we would like to embrace other new format. However, personally I still think Tag format is the best to human readers(Even though Turtle/N3 is more readable than RDF/XML, it is still not straight forward to human beings as Tag). Since your converting tools could convert formats very well, finding only one universal format looks like a good idea to establish a strong standard. But I still think we need figure out the problem is that what format is best for what purpose (read directly by human; shipped with software components; transfer between machines; archived in permanent media) to make the end users(human or machine) easy to accept SPDX. Best regards, Liang On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 8:38 AM, Matt Germonprez <[email protected]> wrote: Hi Gary, I'll let Liang chime in on this one as he is closer to the JSON than I am. We are using JSON in the Yocto project as a way to capture the file data in the ultimate production of SPDX documents. matt On Sun, Feb 9, 2014 at 1:58 PM, Gary O'Neall <[email protected]> wrote: Hi Matt and Liang, I don't know if Jack or anyone else on the tech call already mentioned this to you, but we were talking about moving the tag/value and RDF/XML formats to JSON in SPDX 2.0. From what I remember, the FOSSOLOGY/SPDX code used JSON as an intermediate format. I was curious what you thought about this. The problem we are trying to solve is being able to represent something like a hierarchy or graph. In the tag/value format, it is difficult to denote which object a child object belongs to. This isn't a problem for the RDF/XML format, but if the new format for the tag/value was sufficiently rich, it could get us to a single format (which would greatly simplify things). There is also a proposal to use Turtle/N3. Even with my RDF bias, I'm leaning towards the JSON format since it is quite popular and very straight forward. The only downside is it does not have a schema to provide validation. This leaves it up to the tools developers to validate the format in code. Let me know what you think or feel free to post thoughts directly to the spdx-tech mailing list. Gary From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Bill Schineller Sent: Tuesday, January 28, 2014 12:09 PM To: [email protected] Subject: translating RDF-XML to Turtle (N3) or JSON format Tech Team: From our concall discussion about exploring a single, machine-and-human-readable format that we can validate against our vocabulary (as an alternative to maintaining both tag-value and RDF-XML formats...): We started with an RDF-XML example http://git.spdx.org/?p=spdx-tools.git;a=blob_plain;f=Examples/SPDXRdfExample .rdf;hb=HEAD and used this translator http://rdf-translator.appspot.com/ to go to N3 (Turtle) and JSON formats. I've attached the output of each translation. - Bill -- Mutual of Omaha Associate Professor of Information Systems University of Nebraska at Omaha <http://myweb.unomaha.edu/~mgermonprez/> Vita <http://ocrl.unomaha.edu/> Open Communities Lab <http://1.usa.gov/17mbd1Z> NSF Grant on Open Communities
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