BLUF: After further consideration, I am willing to go along with a prevailing consensus for allowing blank nodes in SPDX 3.0 under the specific skolemization conditions agreed to on the call if such a prevailing consensus exists.
All, I put some more thought into the blank nodes situation after our call yesterday. I still believe we should avoid the use of blank nodes given their problematic nature and added complexity. That being said, given what I believe was our consensus agreement on the tech call yesterday that IF we decide to allow blank nodes it would ONLY be allowed at the serialization level and skolemization (converting localized blank node IDs into globally unique IRI IDs) MUST be performed as part of ANY deserialization then I am willing to go along with a prevailing consensus for allowing blank nodes under these conditions in SPDX 3.0 if such a prevailing consensus exists. This is in the interests our common goal of moving 3.0 along as quickly as we can and is made possible by the fact that required Skolemization removes showstopper integrity issues and leaves only more tractable complexity, performance, and practicality issues. I still see only one advantage of using blank nodes which is brevity of serialized content, however, given the community’s current sensitivity on this issue it seems like its priority should likely be higher than some of the other limiting issues in play here. I suspect that as adoption and use of SPDX matures and adopters recognize and seek out more mature and advanced capabilities to utilize SPDX data the importance of brevity will likely decline in favor of more practical and capable approaches. We can let the community push that maturation forward after 3.0 release. I do feel it important to note that deciding to allow blank nodes in 3.0 does bring with it several remaining concerns including increased complexity and resource cost for SDPX content consumers, significant limitations on linked data use cases, limitations on the viability and value of utilizing deterministic global IDs to auto-correlate content, and increased complexity in serialization/deserialization design and implementation across different serialization forms. We also will still need to decide on an appropriate Skolemization approach. We should keep all of these in mind and remember that there is a relatively simple solution (at the cost of some brevity) when the SPDX community becomes aware of these issues and seeks solutions. Thank you all for the constructive conversations on this topic and your consideration of these concerns. Sean Barnum MITRE -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#5277): https://lists.spdx.org/g/Spdx-tech/message/5277 Mute This Topic: https://lists.spdx.org/mt/100512930/21656 Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.spdx.org/g/Spdx-tech/unsub [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
