[slaymaker1907]

I assume that serialization formats might reference this standard so that they don’t need to reinvent the wheel that is graph normalization.

> A canonicalization algorithm is necessary, but not necessarily sufficient, to handle many of these use cases.

It’s kind of like how there’s a standard for structured copy of JS objects that gets used for things like the web worker spec.

Signing something independent of serialization might be useful since then the exact serialization format can vary. For example, maybe the data is already serialized using SQLite. I’d prefer to avoid loading the data into memory and reserializing it just to check the signature. Instead, it’d be nice to just canonicalize it and then utilize the indexing capabilities of SQLite to minimize memory usage.

[oever]

So the use-case is a to a very tentative optimization. This tentative optimization is achieved by introducing a very complicated algorithm that is not guaranteed to run in finite time.

You could also check signatures when loading the data and keep the original bytearray separately in slow/cheap storage.

That way you can sign RDF graphs like you sign any bytearray and keep a simple design.