Re: Troublesome relations

Danny --

I don't see much of a conflict,  {relational,RDF} religious dogma aside.

To oversimplify a bit, a triples form of RDF can be treated as a ternary 
relation.  There's quite a bit of work that one can find via Google on 
storing and indexing such triples usefully in Oracle and the like.

One concern though, is that writing queries, and understanding what they 
are returning, can be much harder if we insist on storing everything at low 
arity.

There's an online example at our site**, called RDFQueryLangComparison1, 
that hopefully illustrates the last point.

                                 Cheers,  -- Adrian



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Dr. Adrian Walker
Reengineering LLC
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At 01:34 PM 10/19/2004 +0200, you wrote:

>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 12:17:44 UTC