- From: Frank Manola <fmanola@mitre.org>
- Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2001 11:37:34 -0500
- CC: RDF Interest <www-rdf-interest@w3.org>
Inserts may have been solved as far as the simple mechanics of publishing them is concerned, but the semantic aspects are essentially the same as those of updates and deletes: you have to deal with temporal (or nonmonotonic) effects: specifically, the idea that the set of assertions has now changed, and that may change what you now conclude from the set of assertions (a subsequent email has pointed out that an update can be considered a combined delete-and-add operation). The whole issue of transactions (in the database sense) comes in too, since you may want to make what is a semantically-consistent modification to the "database" that consists of several distinct operations (inserts, deletes, modifys), and want somehow to bracket that set of operations. --Frank Aaron Swartz wrote: > snip > > ***Inserts > > Inserts (adding triples) has been already solved. To insert data to > the decentralized database, you simply publish it to the Web at a > well-known location. > > ***Updates and Deletes > > Updates (modifying triples) and deletes (removing triples) are more > difficult, and require entering an area that RDF has been afraid to > touch: time. Most RDF systems do not factor time into the equation, or > at least, they do it in a simplistic way. > -- Frank Manola The MITRE Corporation 202 Burlington Road, MS A345 Bedford, MA 01730-1420 mailto:fmanola@mitre.org voice: 781-271-8147 FAX: 781-271-8752
Received on Monday, 19 February 2001 11:21:45 UTC