[Developers] MQL index property

[Christopher R. Maden]

David Flanagan wrote:
> The indexes seem to correspond to release order of the albums, 
> but I don't know if this is true in general.

What Alec said: the indices for albums are the release order only 
because the import script I wrote set the indices that way.

The unordered albums are ones for which no release dates were known, and 
so no order was asserted.

> Can anyone provide other examples of useful orderings?

Alec mentioned movie stars.  I also try to order most long lists of 
property values; for instance, the members of the California legislature 
are ordered with the current officers first, then the current members by 
district, then past members.

> Is there any 
> programmatic way to find out what properties are ordered and what the 
> ordering represents?  Or does this simply come down to a schema 
> documentation issue?

Neither, really.  Ordering is a property of data, not of schemata; any 
non-unique property can have its values ordered, and there is no way to 
require (or even request) its values to be ordered.

~Chris
-- 
Christopher R. Maden
Data Architect
Metaweb Technologies, Inc.
<URL: http://www.metaweb.com/ >