Re: Eliminate duplicates in expansion?

On May 23, 2012, at 6:02 PM, Manu Sporny wrote:

> On 05/23/2012 07:17 AM, Markus Lanthaler wrote:
>> in a recent update to the test suite Dave changed the behavior of
>> expansion to remove duplicates in sets. Is this what we wanna do?
> 
> Yes. It doesn't make sense for a set to contain a duplicate of the same
> member (per the mathematical definition of a set):
> 
> "A set is a gathering together into a whole of definite, distinct
> objects of our perception [Anschauung] and of our thought – which are
> called elements of the set."
> 
>    -- Georg Cantor, Beiträge zur Begründung der transfiniten Mengenlehre
> 
> The key phrase there being "distinct objects".
> 
>> So, e.g., "prop": [ 1, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3 ] will now get expanded to
>> "prop": [ 1, 2, 3 ] (of course as @value objects). Is this what we
>> wanna do? Or is this something we should do as part of framing resp.
>> subject map generation?
> 
> I think all of the algorithms should clean sets... we could also take
> the position that no cleaning should be done for performance reasons.
> That's really the strongest counter-point I can see now - performance...
> because multi-hundred-thousand-member sets are not going to be
> performant for this algorithm.

Furthermore, RDF Graphs do not support duplicate triples, which is another reading of the "distinct objects" bit. So, I agree, that @set arrays must have duplicates removed. Note the case for @list, though.

Gregg

> -- manu
> 
> -- 
> Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny)
> Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
> blog: PaySwarm Website for Developers Launched
> http://digitalbazaar.com/2012/02/22/new-payswarm-alpha/
> 

Received on Thursday, 24 May 2012 01:36:11 UTC