- From: Charles Greer <cgreer@marklogic.com>
- Date: Tue, 08 Nov 2011 10:09:01 -0800
- To: William Waites <wwaites@tardis.ed.ac.uk>
- CC: "phayes@ihmc.us" <phayes@ihmc.us>, "public-rdf-wg@w3.org" <public-rdf-wg@w3.org>
As somebody who built a successful production system based on quads, I'd hazard to say that there is a special case for place #4, and also a good reason to stop there. It's been well established that the triple is enough to encode any kind of data. The fourth place simply gives the triple store a method for knowing which triples to delete and/or replace. All data stores have the temporal problem -- is this closed world representative of a point in time or a record of events? RDF to me doesn't look like the place to resolve this question. What place four does is provides a means to ease implementation and make a set of triples work in practical applications. I'm not frankly sure if this is the place for this kind of input, being new to the process, but I'd support a view of place #4 as 'implementation dependent' so as to enable a wide variety of data store types. Charles On 11/08/2011 01:31 AM, William Waites wrote: > Hi Pat, I hope you are rapidly recovering and feeling better. > > Reading this idea about repurposing the fourth column to talk about > time, or generally to support ternary predicates, I wonder if I'm just > pointing out the obvious that as useful as it is, how long before > people start wanting 4, 5, ... n place predicates? And then have we > just started reinventing relational databases or prolog, only with > URIs? (not that that would necessarily be a bad thing...) > > I guess it would be pretty easy to modify the n-quads parsers to > handle n-tuples at any rate, the '.' record delimiter is easy to > spot... > > Cheers, > -w > -- Charles Greer Senior Engineer MarkLogic Corporation charles.greer@marklogic.com Phone: +1 707 408 3277 www.marklogic.com This e-mail and any accompanying attachments are confidential. The information is intended solely for the use of the individual to whom it is addressed. Any review, disclosure, copying, distribution, or use of this e-mail communication by others is strictly prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, please notify us immediately by returning this message to the sender and delete all copies. Thank you for your cooperation.
Received on Tuesday, 8 November 2011 18:09:43 UTC