Re: ISSUE-9 Another question about Generate Blank Nodes

On Tue, 2011-02-01 at 23:11 +0100, Sören Auer wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> In todays telco several people (including Souri and me) supported the 
> idea to abandon the use of blank notes. Is there any fundamental reason 
> (beside philosopical views) to use blank nodes?
> If not I suggest we just generate IRIs for all resources. Of course this 
> does not yet solve the problem of how they should be created, but we 
> could follow the following strategy:
> 
> * if there is a candidate key use the candidate key,

What if they are several ones? What if there is a NULL value? Does it
make really sense to map a row to some arbitrary candidate key?

> * if there is no candidate key, but an internal row identifier (e.g. 
> Virtuoso has such one always) use this row identifier,

You can be tempted to use the row identifier but this one must remain
hidden as it's not exposed in SQL. It's only accessible by the database
vendor, not by the guys relying only on SQL, like in our prototype.

> * if nether one exists, generate an identifier using a hash function 
> over all values of the row + an incremented counter in case duplicate 
> rows exist

"incremented counter" sound like a side-effect to me :-) I'm interested
to know how you will simply translate that in a mathematical function
(ie. the output depends only on the input).

Anyway, the behaviour of such a URI mimics so much the semantics of a
Blank Node that I really prefer to see a real Blank Node instead.

My two cents,

Alexandre.

> 
> Wouldn't this be a simple and effective solution to the problem?
> 
> Best,
> 
> Sören
> 
> 

Received on Tuesday, 1 February 2011 22:54:49 UTC