Raw

I posted the other day a note-to-self re. Listy Thing, though I haven't done any coding on that since I have been puzzling over one particular bit, which boils down to : how best to represent lists in RDF. Ok, there's rdfs:List and Wikipedia has quite a good definition of list, but that's not really the end of the story, there are a few practical considerations.

The conceptual model I want is just the usual thing of a finite ordered sequence of things, for sorting out my own lists: shopping, project resources and todo, bookmarks, list of people (friends & circles) etc. etc. The items in these lists will generally be either text or links (which fits nicely with RDF literals and resources)...or other lists. Ok, that just jumped into graph-land. Also the lists/items may also be lots of other things as well - like a todo list might contain tasks (yeah, got an unfinished vocab for that as well). An item may be multiple lists and so on. But the practical model I'm after is pretty much a direct reflection of HTML lists:

,
and
• to allow easy rendering/manipulation in the browser.

  One of my favourite typed-item lists of all time is (appropriately enough) Enrico Franconi's Description Logics Course. I want to be able to put things like that together really easily and - the why RDF? part - reuse the data easily.

  I've played with very similar stuff before with something I called XOW, XHTML Outlines for W6, where W6 was a simple vocab for adding just a bit of semantics to resources (addressing the questions who, why, what, when, where, how - I think it was Libby set me going down this path). Beh, loads of link rot around there, must fix - basically you could make lists of typed items in the browser, the result could be sent through XSLT to produce RDF.

  I've come at it afresh from the motivation of wanting to sort out my own lists, sod any wider problems. The tools are much better this time around, but the modelling thing is stil a quandary.

  With a bit of googling I've found some good scripts to get started and have been noodling on the HTML side - drag and drop reordering of lists, with in-place editing. Current home: live here, in github here (note - dev branch of seki). It's not far off what I reckon I need.

  Now there's the fun bit of expressing this material as pure data to stick it in a store and access via SPARQL (1.1). First pass at least I'll probably use XSLT in lots of places, the transformations should be pretty straightforward, but the SPARQL side is a bit tricky. Andy Seaborne has done a great post about lists with SPARQL Update, and as I'm using his Fuseki for storage it stands a good chance of working (heh).

  But I want to be able to muck around with these things a lot, so I'm wondering whether it might be advantageous to also 1. overlay some old-fashioned RDF container stuff on the lists as well (i.e. rdf:Seq) and even 2. simple ordinal property values, something like :

  :contains [ a :listitem; :value ; :inlist :position "43" ] .

  Dunno, may this might help with matching quirks like those Andy mentions, "the empty list isn't any RDF triples, so looking for lists isn't just looking for rdf:rest properties", (rdf:nil keeps running away!) and with SPARQL 1.1 property paths, list elements do not necessarily come out in order.

  Funnily enough, lists in RDF seem to attract a lot of caveats - there's the old stuff about how 'weak' containers are, the lovely line in the RDFS spec: "Just as a hen house may have the property that it is made of wood, that does not mean that all the hens it contains are made of wood, a property of a container is not necessarily a property of all of its members.". In the same spec, the delightful: "RDFS does not require that there be only one first element of a list-like structure, or even that a list-like structure have a first element.". But if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck then it's made of wood, hence a witch.

  Suggestions very welcome, here's a G+ Page , see if that works for comments.

  PS. also related is the Linked Data API stuff re. lists, see e.g. listvalued_props