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

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.

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

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Steve Harris
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Received on Thursday, 14 February 2013 12:13:10 UTC