Re: ISSUE-77: Should we mark rdf:Seq as archaic (cf ISSUE-24)

On Fri, 2011-10-14 at 14:05 +0200, Ivan Herman wrote:
> On Oct 14, 2011, at 13:15 , Dan Brickley wrote:
> 
> > On 14 October 2011 11:56, Steve Harris <steve.harris@garlik.com> wrote:
> >> Not only that, it's actually useful.
> >> 
> >> There's only two (common) syntactic ways of expressing sequences/arrays/vectors, rdf:Seq and RDF Collections.
> >> 
> >> Both are pretty cumbersome, ugly, and arguably "broken" from some perspective, but as we don't have a valid replacement I don't think we should remove either one at the moment.
> > 
> > 
> > Yup, sorry I forgot XMP briefly; but yes that + RSS1 are significant,
> > even if "old fashioned". XMP in particular is very hard to update
> > because the files are all out there in the wild. I'm not sure we gain
> > much by making some of our biggest and earliest backers look retro.
> > 
> > Doing ordering in a binary relationship structure like RDF, especially
> > with all the open-worldism and data mixing, is always going to be a
> > challenge. We'd do better issueing friendly guidelines and examples
> > and tutorials, than issuing grand proclamations about how people's
> > REC-following data is broken / obsolete.
> 
> +1

I politely disagree.    I think Turtle makes RDF Collections seem quite
nice, and hopefully that will quickly set the tone (perhaps with a
little help from us) for APIs and SPARQL 1.2 (?) having nice list
handling functions that are as efficient as native (non-destructive)
list handling functions. (I hope some APIs do this already.)

Could that be done for Seq as well?  I don't think so, since there's no
closing of the list.  So, we end up with one pretty-decent list
mechanism, and one less-good one.   I think the only fair thing, in that
situation, is to tell people that's what we've got.   And if you tell
people they could use A or B, and A is better than B, that amounts to
marking B as an Archaism.

   -- Sandro

Received on Saturday, 15 October 2011 03:40:51 UTC