[Developers] MQL index property

[Christopher R. Maden]

David Flanagan <david at davidflanagan.com> wrote:
> So this is kind of a meta question, but how do I know when the data is 
> ordered.

This is really only an issue if you are writing an ultra-general application.  In that case, it’s probably best to always ask for the index if you think your users will care about the order, or at least always ask for the index for non-unique properties.  (It may be worth noting at this point that the “type” property (/type/object/type) itself is non-unique and can be ordered; this is how the Freebase client decides in what order to display the types on a topic.)

I think there’s an expectation, though, that many applications will be specific to one subject matter or another and have some a priori knowledge of the schemata which they consider interesting.  However, as I’ve said since I started working here, if we are successful, our users will surprise us, so expectations are certainly not binding!

> It seems to me that it would be nice if there was an informative (as 
> opposed to normative) property of /type/property to indicate that there 
> is like to be an ordering on that property.

This seems like a reasonable suggestion... does anyone else (who is not trying to document the entire bloody system) agree?  It would be good to have a sense of the interest level.

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