- From: Sandro Hawke <sandro@w3.org>
- Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2007 13:08:21 -0400
- To: David Powell <djpowell@djpowell.net>
- Cc: Garret Wilson <garret@globalmentor.com>, semantic-web@w3.org
> > First, in my opinion rdf:Seq is antiquated, but we can talk about the
> > same thing in terms of rdf:List.
>
> Yeah me too, usually, but in this case I shied away from adding all
> those extra triples and bnodes.
...
> Lists are difficult to model satisfactorily. The only way that I can
> imagine the situation being better in RDF is if RDF had a native list
> type. Like a type of literal, that was a single resource that could
> hold references to one or more literals, bnodes, or uris.
It sounds like your issue with rdf:Collection/rdf:List is based on an
intuition about it having "all those triples". But those are only there
in the model, and in some implementations. They don't need to be there
in the serialization (cf parsetype=rdf:Collection) and they don't need
to be there in the implementation (cf cwm's internalization of lists).
So, my advise is to use lists and let the implementations catch up.
> [Literals, are even more of an obstacle to extensibility. If I was RDF
> King, then Literals wouldn't exist and instead we'd have bnodes with
> an intrinsic label so that we could use them as subjects, and you
> wouldn't need to worry about them being dead-ends when used in
> vocabularies...]
Yes, something like that was high on my list, too. Alas, many
compromises had to be made in standardization. :-(
-- Sandro
Received on Monday, 2 April 2007 17:08:43 UTC