One outstanding problem in interpreting Ripple programs independently of a
query engine (among other things, preventing Ripple from being a proper RDF
format) is that keyword bindings are not explicitly given. Thus, the
meaning of any source code which uses keywords depends on the configuration
of libraries and primitives in the Ripple environment, which is by no means
constant. Providing a way to explicitly define keywords would:
1) make "complete", self-contained Ripple source files possible, and as an
added benefit,
2) allow users to create keywords for resources which are important to
their applications
This syntax would be handy:
@keyword foo: <http://example.org/ns#foo> .
This clashes a bit with N3's @keywords directive. However, @keywords
apparently makes reference to the default namespace, so you'd have to use
it in conjunction with @prefix, in a rather awkward way, in order to
achieve the desired effect.
Original link: http://code.google.com/p/ripple/issues/detail?id=40