Re: totalItems vs void:triples

On Monday 27. October 2014 15.12.56 Markus Lanthaler wrote:
> What are the practical consequences of this? I think it boils down to the
> questions of what people will use hydra:totalItems for. Do you have an
> application that requires hydra:totalItems to be 100% accurate?

Errr, no... :-) So, what it boils down to for me is that I don't see the use 
for two vaguely defined terms. The approximate nature of void:triples is 
presently useful. Clearly. And it will allow stuff like sampling algorithms 
in the future. I just don't see the reason why totalItems should be roughly 
the same, that just seems like duplication, URI aliasing, and a waste of 
bandwidth to me. I much rather like to see it being defined as exact at the 
time of the timestamp (which may be expressed as the Date header field in a 
HTTP response).

Just speculating: If you had a data stream management system (as opposed to 
the database management systems that are usually underneath the stuff we 
do)... Having the exact number of triples in a rolling or tumbling window, 
which may be a small number, might be important and actually not difficult to 
compute, no?

So, I guess I'll turn the question around: Do you have any applications that 
are able to make both terms useful if they are both defined to be 
approximations?


Cheers,

Kjetil

Received on Monday, 27 October 2014 19:45:26 UTC