Re: "Simple Lists" (was Re: ISSUE-77: Should we mark rdf:Seq as archaic (cf ISSUE-24))

On Mon, 2011-10-17 at 15:06 +0100, Richard Cyganiak wrote:
> On 17 Oct 2011, at 11:47, Andy Seaborne wrote:
> >>> I think the only complete solution will involve putting structural
> >>> literals into RDF itself, so they are not triple-encoded and can't be
> >>> 'bad'.  When treated as first-class literals with equality rules,
> >>> accessors, and combining rules, then implementations can store them
> >>> specially, provide good APIs, and application programmer won't have to
> >>> learn about the encoding rules.
> >> 
> >> That sounds pretty hard.  Do you have some design in mind...?
> > 
> > RDF 2.  Not this WG.
> > 
> > Add "list" to  IRI,BNode and literal
> > Or subtype of literal but as it has it's own syntax etc it feels different.
> > 
> > IF this is to advance, I think it needs serious scoping and investigation with all the stakeholders involved.  RDF-WG isn't that place either by our current timeline, nor by the constituency of people involved.
> > 
> > An XG perhaps?
> > 
> > You could add into the change mix adding graph literals to RDF 2+
> 
> +1 to setting up an XG to look into list literals, graph literals and similar.
> 
> RDF-WG should standardize what's already used and shown to work. A focused XG is a good place for doing some research and developing proposals for RDF2.

I agree re list-literals.    Not sure about graph-literals.

I'm not really comfortable with giving no guidance whatsoever about Seq
and Lists.  My perception is there's general (if not unanimous)
agreement that Lists are better than Seq, it's not great to have both,
and it's best to use Lists in something like the Simple List form (ie
bnodes, no loops, closed, etc). 

Before this group was chartered, when it wasn't clear it would be, I
proposed we simply do a survey of the experts and practitioners on
questions like this, and make the results public -- then new folks could
judge for themselves what features were actually being used, and why,
and by whom.    But I think, given we have a WG, we can do a bit better
than that.

    -- Sandro

Received on Monday, 17 October 2011 14:32:50 UTC