Re: RDF Lists

On 4 May 2012, at 17:25, Sandro Hawke wrote:

> On Fri, 2012-05-04 at 10:08 -0400, Manu Sporny wrote:
>> On 05/04/2012 03:47 AM, Andy Seaborne wrote:
>>> On 04/05/12 05:11, Manu Sporny wrote:
>>>> In summary - RDF Lists are difficult to implement, even for people
>>>> that know quite a bit about RDF. They are fantastically difficult
>>>> to grasp for Web developers. They are really hard to author in many
>>>> of the RDF syntaxes.
>>> 
>>> but not Turtle :-) and your other messages suggests Turtle
>>> everywhere.
>> 
>> Yes, TURTLE got it right. :)
>> 
>>>> I'd like to propose something that the group should seriously
>>>> consider:
>>>> 
>>>> 1. Add lists as a first-class citizen for all RDF serializations -
>>>> deprecate all serializations that don't support lists as
>>>> first-class citizens.
>>> 
>>> This is the only complete solution -- anything that encodes in
>>> triples means that the triples view will show through to developers.
>> 
>> Yes, to be more precise, an object can  now be:
>> 
>> * a plain literal (with optional language)
>> * a typed literal
>> * an IRI
>> * a list (with optional type)
> 
> My proposal was that for RDF 1.1 we highlight the notion of a
> "Well-Formed List" as a list that can be losslessly serialized in
> Turtle, and suggest that Best Practice is to use Well-Formed Lists in
> preference to all the other RDF list/collection/container mechanisms. 
> This seems to me be a good transitional stage.

I don't agree with this view, I think lists (well formed or not) are just a pain point in RDF.

> Personally, I think we should put all that other stuff on notice that it
> might go away in RDF 2.0, but I'm not sure we can get consensus on that.

We'd rather lose Lists, and keep Sequences, if it came to a (hypothetical) crunch.

IMHO, the only real solution is a first-class "vector"* literal.

- Steve

* we seem to have used up many of the other names for ordered lists :-/

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Received on Tuesday, 8 May 2012 17:47:09 UTC