Re: Problem with auto-generated fragment IDs for graph names

* 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
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> 

-- 
-ericP

Received on Thursday, 14 February 2013 12:59:14 UTC