Subject: [ietf-types] Request for review of N-Triples (an RDF serialization) media type: application/n-triples

From: Eric Prud'hommeaux <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2012 11:36:30 -0400

Hi all, we're about to publish a last call of an RDF representation called N-Triples.
<http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/rdf/raw-file/default/rdf-turtle/index.html#sec-mediaReg-n-triples>
(Yes, the contact and the subtype in this email are not in synch with those in the editor's draft -- the email documents plan A and will be reflected to the editor's draft before publication.)
One question is whether to use "application/ntriples" or "application/n-triples", with a preference for the latter.
It'd be great to get feedback on the subtype and registration before last call publication.

Contact:
    World Wide Wed Consortium <[email-masked]>
See also:
    How to Register a Media Type for a W3C Specification
    Internet Media Type registration, consistency of use
    TAG Finding 3 June 2002 (Revised 4 September 2002)

The Internet Media Type / MIME Type for N-Triples is "application/n-triples".

It is recommended that N-Triples files have the extension ".nt" (all lowercase) on all platforms.

It is recommended that N-Triples files stored on Macintosh HFS file systems be given a file type of "TEXT".

This information that follows will be submitted to the IESG for review, approval, and registration with IANA.

Type name:
    application
Subtype name:
    n-triples
Required parameters:
    None
Optional parameters:
    None
Encoding considerations:
    The syntax of N-Triples is expressed over code points in Unicode [UNICODE]. The encoding is always UTF-8 [UTF-8].
    Unicode code points may also be expressed using an \uXXXX (U+0 to U+FFFF) or \UXXXXXXXX syntax (for U+10000 onwards) where X is a hexadecimal digit [0-9A-F]
Security considerations:
    N-Triples is a general-purpose assertion language; applications may evaluate given data to infer more assertions or to dereference IRIs, invoking the security considerations of the scheme for that IRI. Note in particular, the privacy issues in [RFC3023] section 10 for HTTP IRIs. Data obtained from an inaccurate or malicious data source may lead to inaccurate or misleading conclusions, as well as the dereferencing of unintended IRIs. Care must be taken to align the trust in consulted resources with the sensitivity of the intended use of the data; inferences of potential medical treatments would likely require different trust than inferences for trip planning.
    N-Triples is used to express arbitrary application data; security considerations will vary by domain of use. Security tools and protocols applicable to text (e.g. PGP encryption, MD5 sum validation, password-protected compression) may also be used on N-Triples documents. Security/privacy protocols must be imposed which reflect the sensitivity of the embedded information.
    N-Triples can express data which is presented to the user, for example, RDF Schema labels. Application rendering strings retrieved from untrusted N-Triples documents must ensure that malignant strings may not be used to mislead the reader. The security considerations in the media type registration for XML ([RFC3023] section 10) provide additional guidance around the expression of arbitrary data and markup.
    N-Triples uses IRIs as term identifiers. Applications interpreting data expressed in N-Triples should address the security issues of Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRIs) [RFC3987] Section 8, as well as Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax [RFC3986] Section 7.
    Multiple IRIs may have the same appearance. Characters in different scripts may look similar (a Cyrillic "о" may appear similar to a Latin "o"). A character followed by combining characters may have the same visual representation as another character (LATIN SMALL LETTER E followed by COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT has the same visual representation as LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH ACUTE). Any person or application that is writing or interpreting data in Turtle must take care to use the IRI that matches the intended semantics, and avoid IRIs that make look similar. Further information about matching of similar characters can be found in Unicode Security Considerations [UNISEC] and Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRIs) [RFC3987] Section 8. 
Interoperability considerations:
    There are no known interoperability issues.
Published specification:
    This specification.
Applications which use this media type:
    No widely deployed applications are known to use this media type. It may be used by some web services and clients consuming their data.
Additional information:
Magic number(s):
    None.
File extension(s):
    ".nt"
Macintosh file type code(s):
    "TEXT"
Person & email address to contact for further information:
    Eric Prud'hommeaux <[email-masked]>
Intended usage:
    COMMON
Restrictions on usage:
    None
Author/Change controller:
    The N-Triples specification is the product of the RDF WG. The W3C reserves change control over this specifications.

-- 
-ericP