Re: RDF Lists

On 04/05/12 05:11, Manu Sporny wrote:
...

> In summary - RDF Lists are difficult to implement, even for people that
> know quite a bit about RDF. They are fantastically difficult to grasp
> for Web developers. They are really hard to author in many of the RDF
> syntaxes.

but not Turtle :-) and your other messages suggests Turtle everywhere.

>
> I'd like to propose something that the group should seriously consider:
>
> 1. Add lists as a first-class citizen for all RDF serializations -
> deprecate all serializations that don't support lists as first-class
> citizens.

This is the only complete solution -- anything that encodes in triples 
means that the triples view will show through to developers.

But IMHO making these changes as part of an incremental update of RDF is 
not a good idea.  RDF 2.0, or more realistically as part of a planned 
migration from where we are today to where we want to be.  Simply 
replacing one approach with another one without looking at the deployed 
base of software and published data is not a planned migration.

> 2. Get rid of the the Seq, Bag and List classes - replace with two
> datatypes - rdf:ordered and rdf:unordered. All "lists" in RDF are
> ordered by default.

Personally, I don't see the need to have unordered as well.  This 
overlaps with the property definition of the property pointing to the 
list value.

>
> So, N-Triples and N-Quads could look something like this:

Yes, NT and NQ will need list syntax.

...

 > Surely, this
> has been discussed before? Anyone have a link?

Not quite a permathread but going that way!

	Andy

Received on Friday, 4 May 2012 07:47:51 UTC