can we remove the need for ordered collections?
Feb 28th, 2005 by Phil Dawes
The tagtriples thing has also let me experiment with ways to get around some of the not-so-beautiful areas of the RDF spec. One of these areas is ordered collections.
It occurred to me, (well, actually it occured to Julian Bond and he mentioned it to me a while ago in a conversation about RSS after foaf-galway, but it re-occurred to me the other day) that the requirement for an hacky ordered collection construct could be reduced if the order of asserted statements in graphs were maintained (like they are in XML documents).
I’m thinking of adding a column to the triples table so that query results can be sorted in the order they were asserted.
I don’t think I agree. Right now RDF is to directed graphs is like what S-expressions are to lists. If the order of statements was significant then it would drifting a lot further away from that ideal. Yet, it is the directed graph intepretation which makes RDF more useful for some types of data modeling than plain-old XML. Besides, it is too late to change RDF significantly. Too many applications already depend on the current interpretation.
Jimmy Cerra Writes:
Yet, it is the directed graph intepretation which makes RDF more useful for some types of data modeling than plain-old XML.
Definately, but retaining statement order doesn’t mean ditching the directed-graph interpretation.
it is too late to change RDF significantly. Too many applications already depend on the current interpretation.
Of course you’re right, but it’s interesting to explore the idea.