Afternoon. Again, I’m new to solid and trying to read through the spec. I’m trying to simplify the spec to simple components. One of the pieces I keep seeing is the Linked Data being the centralized theme. It seems like linked data is being represented in The text/turtle format. Just want to understand if turtle is part of the spec.
Yes, RDF / Linked Data define the structure of semantic data which Solid uses, and Turtle is one of several representations or serialisation formats.
Turtle must be supported by a Solid implementation (ie you get it by default), others can be requested by an app, but may not be available from the server. In practice I think most Solid server implementations will support multiple representations such as XML, JSON-LD, HTML and text, as well. You can see this for node solid server if you look at the Fetcher in rdflib.js
Hope that helps!
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It does help a lot! Can you help me understand how a Turtle document might help link data together? That’s the other thing I’m having a hard time understanding?
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Now you are testing me… 
I’ll have a go but if someone who knows would like to sanity check I’d appreciate.
Turtle is just the representation, and it is a nice human readable format designed for the purpose, although I’m still only basic level myself.
So it could be in any format and still it links things together.
But for Turtle you can say here is X, and X relates to Y in some way. There’s a distinction between things in the world and documents that hold information about things.
A document is also a thing, but it is special, in that it contains information about other things.
So Turtle is a way of representing that. Take a profile, that holds information about an entity such as me, or Inrupt for example. And a WebID is a way of identifying myself in such a profile.
So for ex, https://thewebalyst.solid.community/profile/card#me is my WebID, and implies there is a profile document at https://thewebalyst.solid.community/profile/card that contains information about ‘me’. The #me fragment to identifies me in the document.
Within the profile information can be embedded or linked. So I might have other linked data documents like a CV, and identify those by saying something like:
me has-cv some-URI
I’m not using a real ontology or Turtle there (sorry), but I hope that gives you the general idea. If you look for examples in the RDF or WebID specs that should fill in the blanks a bit. The Primers are good IMO, or there are articles out there too.
Try this for ex:
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