Re:Datalog in 100 lines of JavaScript (2022)
by cmrdporcupine on Sunday January 21, 2024 @10:42PM
(#39085928)
I first saw "triples" in the context of RDF & the "semantic web" a couple decades ago, and it drove me batty, because really it's just a weird roundabout way of saying "binary relations" but sounding novel....
This article saying it's like "one big table" ... huh? No, it's multiple binary relations. Sure, you could formulate that as one big ternary relation and call it triples? Somehow? Oof. But why?
In any case, binary relations are not intrinsic to Datalog, just to the form of it that Datomic implements. It's entirely possible to make "a datalog" that uses n-ary relations (or to compose binary relations into something that looks n-ary).
This article saying it's like "one big table" ... huh? No, it's multiple binary relations. Sure, you could formulate that as one big ternary relation and call it triples? Somehow? Oof. But why?
In any case, binary relations are not intrinsic to Datalog, just to the form of it that Datomic implements. It's entirely possible to make "a datalog" that uses n-ary relations (or to compose binary relations into something that looks n-ary).