[Developers] attributes of properties?

[John Pritchard]

Hi Alec,

Yes, it's easier to deal with these issues in programming languages than
databases (at least for me).  The subject is about structural integrity.
You're not concerned?  I think I'm getting it, but it worries me like seeing
"everything's a string" in a programming language.

And then you're right that I'm not clear on keys.

Learning, learning.  Thanks for your reply.


Regards,

John



On 3/22/07, Alec Flett <alecf at metaweb.com> wrote:
>
> John Pritchard wrote:
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > Skipping a personal introduction, I'll jump right into some first
> > thoughts on a look into MetaWeb.
> >
> > I like it, but.. MetaWeb appears (to me) to be in need of some "out of
> > band" "attributes of properties".  This is usually where "type" would
> > live, but is best illustrated in the MetaWeb case by "key".  It seems
> > to me, in my humble opinion (ie, without much study), that the "key"
> > thing is a bit messy.
> >
> Can you be more explicit about this? When you say "attributes of
> properties" what kind of attributes are you talking about? Properties
> themselves have a number of properties on them, including
> "expected_type" which is the type that the given value should have (i.e.
> so that /film/film/directed_by has an expected_type of /film/director)
>
> One thing that may be confusing here is that expected_type is not
> strongly enforced - it's really more of a hint to allow the query
> language to make assumptions about property values, which allows the
> syntax to be short when the expected_type of a property value does in
> fact match. I can explain this further if you want...
>
> the "key" thing may also be confusing because "key" is essentially a
> backpointer to the enclosing namespace. i.e. the "key" of
> /wikipedia/en/Anarchism is /wikipedia/en. Since a "namespace" is really
> just node that has a "keys" property, not all items in an id path are
> namespaces. For example, /wikipedia/en/Anarchism is not a namespace, but
> /wikipedia/en is.
>
> Alec
>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.freebase.com/pipermail/developers/attachments/20070322/4e4419fa/attachment-0002.htm