Re: Dispositions of Dave Beckett's comments

Ron Daniel <rdaniel@interwoven.com> wrote:

> Put an 'ORDER BY' clause into the requirements list for the eventual
> RDF query language, and make sure that 'document order' is one of its
> allowed expressions. Then, logic engines can decide when order is
> important by analyzing the queries and not the underlying data.

This is something that I am almost certain will never be done. Document
order is not something maintained in the RDF model, and thus is almost
certain not to be included in any query language. Furthermore, there is no
clear "document order" since most RDF databases will have their data stored
from many documents, sometimes duplicating or overlapping. For example, your
example of SQL has no such ORDER BY clause, because there is no simple way
to preserve "document order" in such a database -- data is written all over
the disk in odd ways, instead the database returns it in whatever way is
fastest.

Such an ORDER BY clause is _extremely unlikely_.

-- 
[ Aaron Swartz | me@aaronsw.com | http://www.aaronsw.com ]

Received on Thursday, 5 April 2001 01:33:06 UTC