Question

Here is how I know to create a class in N3:

:Person a rdfs:Class.

And here is how to specify that a specific ressource is an instance of that class:

:Pat a :Person.

Problem: I want to create a class with more than 20000 instances (programmatically generated). Writing the whole :Pat a :Person. for my 20000 instances makes the ontology file verbose.

Question: is there a work around to make the file smaller?

Answer 1

You can define a custom prefix for the full class URI, and then just use the prefix to refer to the class:

@prefix : <http://example.com/myOntology#>.
@prefix x: <http://example.com/myOntology#MyClass>.

:Alice a x: .
:Bob a x: .
:Charlie a x: .

That’s not exactly readable, but as short as it’s going to get.

I agree with Antoine that there’s little point in this kind of trickery. Disk space is cheap, and this stuff compresses well for network transfer, and for processing in an application it will be expanded anyways.