[Haskell-cafe] Re: [Haskell] updating graphs non-destructively

[Graham Klyne]

[to Haskell-cafe]

At 19:29 17/02/04 -0500, S. Alexander Jacobson wrote:
>Thank you for the link to FGL.  I also looked at
>the boilerplate stuff.  If *feels* like there
>should be a way to embed the graph stuff in the
>boilerplate stuff to allow non-destructive update
>of arbitrary object graphs without handcoding the
>mapping of the datastructure to an object graph?
>
>Is this possible?  Has anyone does this?  Any
>reason to believe its a bad idea?
>
>Alternatively, I could decide up front to
>represent my data as RDF triples (amenable to a
>graph system), but I'd rather take advantage of
>Haskell's type system.

Hmmm (speaking as an RDF advocate) ... that seems like an odd reason for 
using RDF.

Much of the value of RDF is, I would say, as means to exchange information 
*between* programs rather than for internal structuring of data.  An 
RDF-graph-based interface to data provides for some uniformity of access 
and processing that can be useful.  In my own work, I have at least two 
different internal representations for RDF data (neither of which have been 
designed for efficiency).

#g


------------
Graham Klyne
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