Triple abbreviations

Turtle has the ability to abbreviate triples by omitting duplicate subjects and subject/predicate pairs. This has the advantages of:

• Saving space
• Reducing the number of URIs that humans have to read
• Encouraging related properties to be grouped together

URI abbreviations

Long, duplicated, URIs are so common in RDF that a human-readable RDF syntax needs some capability to abbreviate URI prefixes.

I’m ruling out the use of QNames in content, so one option is to invent an application-level syntax for declaring prefixes.

But, why add complexity when XML already natively supports ENTITY declarations via an internal DTD subset... So, the proposal is to encourage the use of entities where abbreviation is required.