Could primaryKey be specified directly as a column name?

• From: David Booth <david@dbooth.org>
• Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2014 18:16:59 -0400
• To: public-csv-wg@w3.org
• Message-ID: <54540A5B.9070706@dbooth.org>

In the 30-Oct-2014 draft at
http://w3c.github.io/csvw/csv2rdf/
there is a very nice, simple example in Sec 4.  (Thanks for that!)  But 
I'm wondering about one detail.

Example 3 shows CSV metadata, which includes:

    . . .
    "columns": [{
     "@id": "_:GID",
     "name": "GID",
     "datatype": "integer"
    }, {
    . . .
   "primaryKey": "_:GID"
}]
    . . .

I notice that the value provided for "primaryKey" above is specified as 
an indirect identifier ("_:GID") for the primary key column, instead of 
being directly specified as the column name "GID".  I assume that there 
is some rationale for doing it this way -- perhaps so that the metadata 
can specify duplicate column names, though wouldn't that be a bad use 
case to support? -- but it seems cumbersome and error prone.  Can this 
be simplified to allow the "primaryKey" to be specified directly as the 
column name?

Thanks,
David

Received on Friday, 31 October 2014 22:17:27 UTC