[Developers] attributes of properties?

[John Pritchard]

Hi Tim,  many thanks for your warm welcome.

I'm using "band" like we often use "space".. I got into "band" when focusing
on web services design issues for tools (services), comparing the HTTP
content-body (POST|PUT XML|JSON) with HTTP query-parameters (GET|POST
url-encoded).  As in "syntactic bands" where the HTTP query string has a
very narrow band (little capacity for structure), and the content-body has a
broad band capacity for structure.  Makes for a quick analysis of tool
(service) design issues.

The debate here would be over a Property named "key", versus any Property
having either Type Key or Attribute Key.

So this is my getting to know Freebase, bringing along concepts from file
formats and relational databases.  For one, the Freebase key has a different
conception from a relational database key.  It's a unique Property value,
but plays a different role in a graph than a key in a table.


Cheers,

John


On 3/22/07, Tim Sturge <tsturge at metaweb.com> wrote:
>
> Hi John,
>
> Welcome to Freebase!
>
> I agree that "key" and /type/key have special behaviour in MQL. They are
> important and common enough to be optimized internally. Hopefully the
> power they bring (the hierarchical path in an id like
> "/common/topic/article" or "/wikipedia/en/Anarchism") makes up for the
> slight inconsistencies in syntax.
>
> My belief is that most languages are stuck with inconsistencies in
> various places and the best you can do is try to minimize the impact on
> the language user. Some very popular languages (Perl and SQL are two
> good examples) have horribly inconsistent syntax, but are in common use
> and considered "easy to use" while others (Lisp is the classic case)
> have a very small and consistent syntax but aren't used that commonly
> and are considered "hard to learn".
>
> I'm also curious as to what you mean by "out of band attributes of
> properties". The closest thing I think MQL has to that is the "link"
> pseudo-property which enables you to examine the internal information of
> a particular property instance (such as who created it and when they did
> so.) This too is somewhat syntatically inconsistent (for example, "link"
> is not a property of any type.)
>
> Thanks for your comments,
>
> Tim
>
> 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.
> >
> > Comments?
> >
> >
> > Cheers all,
> >
> > John
> >
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
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>
>
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