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

On 15 Oct 2011, at 19:35, Andy Seaborne <andy.seaborne@epimorphics.com> wrote:

> 
> 
> On 15/10/11 19:09, Jeremy Carroll wrote:
>> 
>> I think both the Seq and the List constructs present technical issues.
>> Basically it is because both present the possibility of 'bad' data and
>> no clarity about what one should do in the face of it.
> 
> +1
> 
>> We can easily form ill-formed lists with rdf:first or rdf:rest either
>> missing or multiple.
>> We can easily form ill-formed sequences with duplicate or missing rdf:_2
> 
> although Seq are very fragile and lists are merely fragile.  The duplicate rdf:_2 by merging is really nasty.
> 

I consider that a feature not a bug. There are times when you want to
rank things equally in a list. Its not that hard to handle in code
with nested loops.

Where possible I always try to steer people to ordering by some
intrinsic property of the data such as date, alphanetical by title
etc. Custom sequencing properties are another technique.

After much debate the biblio ontology folk settled on a hybrid
approach for describing the authors of a work. They have a repeated
author property that directly relates the work to the author. This can
be convemiently sparqled. They also recommend using an authorList
property whose value is a List that is supposed to enumerate and close
the list of authors so they can say "these and no others".

Ian