How to handle comments?

[hoijui]

The issue

In Rust, there are documentation comments, which are always unambiguously associated with a part of the code (a specific function, a module, ...), and there are other comments, which (at regarding machine-readability) can not be clearly associated with a specific part of the code.
In RDF, doc comments would have to come in the form of regular triples/quads, while all the regular comments would be of the later type, that can not be unambiguously associated with a piece of code.

This later type poses a problem for auto-formatters in any format, including RDF.
This issue gets worse the heavier formatting one applies, e.g. when sorting subjects, predicates and objects.

Possible Solutions

I can think of two solutions:

1. Avoid using this type of comments
2. Create/Use a kind of meta-standard that defines positioning rules plus extra syntax to be used within the content of these comments, that allows them to be automatically and unambiguously associated with a part of the code.

The later is a huge undertaking and probably a bad idea anyway. Either way, it is out of scope for this project, I would say.

I personally opt for the first option in the Turtle I write and maintain myself, by converting comments to triples.
So far I use mostly the predicates rdfs:comment, schema:comment and vaem:todo.
Some comments that mark a section of the Turtle file, including multiple subjects, I converted into a separate subject being a skos:Concept, and then made all the subjects in that section refer to this new subject with skos:member.
This is not perfect yet, but I am pretty happy with this general approach, as it allows for machine-readability, unambiguous association of the comments, and it retains the comments when converting to other RDF serializations, or when loading the data into a DB like oxigraph. One could also easily filter out comments when converting or loading into a DB, if desired. A clear downside is, that it is less flexible this way, as comments can only be associated to subjects. I was also not able to find an ontolgy specifically made for this purpose, so for example I have not found a "FIXME" and "HACK" equivalent in RDF.

Proposed Changes

I imagine a section in the README of this project, dedicated to comments. It could introduce the issue and give suggestions for how to handle it.

We could also include a CLI switch that enables the issuing of warnings for comments in the input, either always, or only when certain formatting options are enabled that are likely to miss-place comments.

Motivation

I manage a few projects that mainly consist of an ontology that many people are meant to be contributing to. Many of these people are non-techies, but there is always also at least one tech person present. The optimal way to handle this situation (In my opinion). is to host the ontology as a turtle file in git, and allow people to freely choose the way to edit it. Some would edit it as-is, in textual form, while others would use GUI editors ( ... dum di dum ....). For this to work smoothly, both auto-formatting and the concise handling of comments is essential.
I would love this to be somewhat standardized and though about and discussed by more minds, even if very unofficially in a section of this projects README and in issues.

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An example ontology where I try to practice "comments as triples":
https://github.com/iop-alliance/OpenKnowHow/blob/master/src/spec/okh.ttl

an affected PR (but not solving this): #9