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A comment on The hunt for the missing data type. Parent comment

Re:The hunt for the missing data type by PaulHoule on Monday March 04, 2024 @12:23PM (#39593037)
I've been involved with RDF and sometimes it seems the gap between "too simple to use RDF" and "too hard to use RDF" is tiny.

For instance I tried to pitch a data processing library a bit like

https://www.knime.com/

but where RDF graphs (roughly like a JSON document) get passed over the "lines" but found that the heavy hitters in this space believed this sort of product has to use columnar execution to be "fast enough". You can certainly build something that can do operations on a dynamic RDF graph (really a set of triple) but in principle you could compile code that treats native data structures as if they were in RDF... You might get pretty good in speed but it won't be as fast as native and hard to make it easier to code for than native.

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Re:The hunt for the missing data type by jes5199 on Monday March 04, 2024 @12:27PM (#39593118)
RDF is an XML standard, isn't it? there was a XML era for collections and dicts, too. That is now largely considered to have been a mistake
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Re:The hunt for the missing data type by zozbot234 on Monday March 04, 2024 @12:34PM (#39593221)
RDF is not dependent on XML. There is a XML representation of RDF, but alternatives include JSON (using JSON-LD) and simple textual formats such as N3 and Turtle.
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Re:The hunt for the missing data type by PaulHoule on Monday March 04, 2024 @12:55PM (#39593558)
One trouble w/ RDF is that there are two official ways to do ordered collections, the RDF list which is basically a LISP list, and then RDF collections where the order is encoded in predicates. Neither is well-supported in most tools, for instance SPARQL lacks the list handling capabilities that you'd see in

https://docs.arangodb.com/3.12/aql/

or

https://www.couchbase.com/products/n1ql/

The XMP spec, for instance, hacks Dublin Core by adding ordering information because... It matters what order the authors are in. Dublin Core on the other hand seems to be developed for cataloging elementary school libraries and they were huge fans of doing the easy stuff and leaving out anything moderately hard, so Dublin Core looks like it has a 1968 level of sophistication and MARC is so much more 2000s. People come to RDF, see all these problems that are ignored, and come to the conclusion RDF is not for them.

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Re:The hunt for the missing data type by hobofan on Monday March 04, 2024 @01:02PM (#39593675)
There is a good repo that collects many of the issues with RDF[0], which I would have loved to have known about earlier in my journey with RDF.

[0]: https://github.com/w3c/EasierRDF

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Re:The hunt for the missing data type by hobofan on Monday March 04, 2024 @02:21PM (#39594745)
While there are (commonly used) alternative serialization formats, RDF is married to XML data model, as all core datatypes of RDF are defined in terms of XSD (XML Schema Definition) datatypes and very closely mimics it's data model.

If you want to have an RDF that is independent of that (e.g. based on Apache Arrow so that it's compatible with modern big data tooling) you might as well start from scratch.

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