- From: Danny Ayers <danny.ayers@gmail.com>
- Date: Tue, 19 Oct 2004 13:34:38 +0200
- To: www-rdf-interest@w3.org
- Cc: jay@icite.net
I've recently been reading around crossover between the RDF model and Codd's relational database model. Jay Fienberg brought to my attention [1] to a couple of comments from C. J. Date and F. Pascal (the legendary database debunkers): On Metadata, RDF and Relational Representation [2] and On Relational Binary Database Design [3]. Their line in both is essentially that the RDB is the One True Model. The comments in [3] don't seem unreasonable (however debatable), but [2] is a longish query with a terse response from Date: [[ This approach is the old argument that all relvars should be binary in a different guise! Thus, a cogent counterargument is: How do you deal with irreducible n-order predicates for n <> 2? ]] Problem I'm having is coming up with practical examples of such predicates, or how this might impact on RDF modelling. (I could well be misinterpreting Date's statement, as Googling "all relvars should be binary" doesn't exactly give evidence of an old argument, rather it gives [2] as the first hit and expanding to 'relation variables' didn't help any). The nearest I can get is in wondering perhaps if this is isomorphic with the way RDF predicates can't be treated as instances for per-usage qualification, you can't really go from predPQ(a, b, c) to predP(a, b), predQ(predP, c). /notation undoubtedly dodgy, hope you can read my mind/ Can anyone please shed light? Cheeers, Danny. [1] http://icite.net/blog/200410/data_articles.html [2] http://www.dbdebunk.com/page/page/1114998.htm [3] http://www.dbdebunk.com/page/page/1147347.htm -- http://dannyayers.com
Received on Tuesday, 19 October 2004 11:34:39 UTC