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SPARQL. Representing human information in relational tables goes against how people actually think and use information. We humans think in tremendous numbers
by gibsonf1 5y ago
SPARQL. Representing human information in relational tables goes against how people actually think and use information. We humans think in tremendous numbers of nested hierarchies, and recursive hierarchy traversal is a nightmare in relational databases. A graph is the structure for data that works best, is most efficient, and actually reflects how things are connected in our brains.
- mindcrime 5y agoI'm a big fan of SPARQL, but the one thing that would concern me about trying to use it outside of the SemWeb context is simply that it assumes data is stored in <S,P,O> triples. Legacy databases by and large are not, so you need an adapter to bridge the representations. And while I know some exist, I haven't really used them and am not sure about the performance impact.
- mst 5y agoYou can get quite far mapping the triple concept to (PK, column, value) or (PK, FK, related-row) and transpiling from there. (I played around with this some years back, not to the point where anything came out of it worthy of publishing, but enough to be pleasantly surprised how far 'quite far' turned out to be in practice)