That’s also not to say that there aren’t better technology choices if you’re building an arbitrary “ephemeral closed world app”, there almost certainly are, depending on your requirements; but I suspect they’re not due to fundamental deficiencies in RDF itself related to ephemerality. Some other reasons to choose RDF (even for a closed ephemeral app) would include: 1. It’s really the only game in town for standards based graph databases (multiple implementations, open and commercial) 2. leveraging existing modelling work and documentation in 3rd party ontologies, or particular technologies already built on RDF. 3. stability due to standards (though not necessarily maturity of implementations) 4. a feature of a particular RDF triplestore implementation That said these requirements usually aren’t going to be primary requirements, so most people will find something more suited to their needs elsewhere.
1@quoll When were were chatting after re:Clojure, you'd mentioned that Datomic datalog (and its derivatives) are not standard Datalog. Do you know if there is a canonical grammar for "standard Datalog" anywhere? Or if it's a standard that's been ratified by an official body?
Not a standard ratified by an official body, no. It was really developed in academia
The syntax is based on Horn clauses, which is what Prolog uses
Hm, yeah. Hakan's pointed me to a couple papers that define grammars as well, but it doesn't seem very consistent.
academia rarely is
heh