You have a RDF graph? You want to commit it to git in order to keep a history of changes? You’re generating it from another data source and want to see how changes in your script affects the output?
RDF as a data model is unordered. So when you dump the graph to a file, be it in Turtle, JSON or XML, you don’t really know whether the changes as seen by git will be meaningful to you.
The solution:
- Serialize to the N-Triples format
- Sort the lines
N-Triples is just lines of <subject> <predicate> <object> . There are no namespace prefixes and no header. This makes it easy to sort, and the sorting makes it easy to diff.
Yes, there’s a lot of ugly repetition, and this might be cumbersome if your data is large. You could maybe throw in some string replacements if size is an issue?
(Photo credit: Robin Mathlener)
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