Hello,
I'm currently trying to solve a problem I have in Turtle: I would like
my output to stay stable, so that it can live on a git without
generating too much diff noise every time the data is regenerated. One
example would be something like:
bdr:G844 a :Place ;
:placeContains bdr:G1183 bdr:G229 bdr:G2CN10883 bdr:G3478
bdr:G3JT12502 bdr:G4885 .
for which I have no guarantee that the list will stay in the same order
if the same model is serialized again. I could turn it into a list:
bdr:G844 a :Place ;
:placeContains ( bdr:G1183 bdr:G229 bdr:G2CN10883 bdr:G3478
bdr:G3JT12502 bdr:G4885 ) .
but that changes my data model, and I don't really need that, as I care
about the order only in serialized documents, not in the dataset itself.
I can hack the output of JSON-LD to do this kind of things, but with
Turtle this looks impossible.
I realize that Turtle doesn't guarantee order and I have no problem with
that. I'm also aware that introducing this kind of sorting will always
have caveats.
But I still think it would be a tremendous help for some users if this
kind of sorting was possible. The way I propose to do so is by
introducing the possibility for the user to provide a Comparator<Triple>
and optionally pass it to org.apache.jena.riot.system.RIOTLib, that
would change the behavior of accTriples() accordingly. That would allow
the current behavior not to change at all, and the new behavior to be
used only by users who would implement a Comparator<Triple> and thus
know what they're doing and what the limitation of this exercise are.
I'm ready to write the code if the idea is considered a good one, but
would like some opinion first. So what do you think?
Thank you,
--
Elie
