- From: Eric Prud'hommeaux <eric@w3.org>
- Date: Thu, 14 Feb 2013 07:58:39 -0500
- To: Steve Harris <steve.harris@garlik.com>
- Cc: William Waites <wwaites@tardis.ed.ac.uk>, richard@cyganiak.de, msporny@digitalbazaar.com, public-rdf-wg@w3.org, public-linked-json@w3.org
* Steve Harris <steve.harris@garlik.com> [2013-02-14 12:12+0000] > On 2013-02-14, at 12:05, William Waites <wwaites@tardis.ed.ac.uk> wrote: > > > I don't think having unnamed graphs is at all strange. RDF graphs are > > anomalous in that they are the only kind of resource that we can talk > > about using persistent global names but can't talk about using > > temporary local names. I find this anomaly to be strange. > > > > But given Andy's remarks the last time around, I agree that this ship > > has sailed for RDF 1.1, we'll have to wait for the next iteration to > > fix it. > > I think that people who've tried to work around the "default" / "unanamed" graph (note, singular) in SPARQL can agree that's it's at best unfortunate, and at worst a giant pain in the arse. I understand why you mention the default graph as a cautionary tale; it's always been a weird wart on the edge of an otherwise pretty consistent system, leaving us with questions about how to define it, how to transfer state, etc. I don't, however, think that it really informs us about the complexity of bnode-labeled graphs (note, plural). From the perspective of writing C code, re-using BNodes for graph labels was exactly zero work. There was no point where I felt like it was unclear how to implement SPARQL or dataset merging or anything else. > If you have exactly one graph, then there's no issue (you never need to refer to it), but as soon as you have >1 it starts to bite you. > > All this thinking about trying to save bytes in the representation I find very concerning - it seems to be assuming that this data is being typed by someone - if your system has people typing in significant quantities of RDF then something is pretty odd, IMHO. We should be aiming for clarity, and unambiguity IMHO, and I don't see how anonymous graphs help. > > - Steve > > -- > Steve Harris > Experian > +44 20 3042 4132 > Registered in England and Wales 653331 VAT # 887 1335 93 > 80 Victoria Street, London, SW1E 5JL > > -- -ericP
Received on Thursday, 14 February 2013 12:59:14 UTC