I've been doing this stuff too long. This Udell dialog on sparse database representation of social data actually makes sense to me ...
Semi-structured database records for social tagging « Jon Udell
... But when we stepped back and looked at the semi-structured data problem in a larger context, beyond the WinFS requirements, we saw the need to extend the top-level SQL type system in that way. Not just UDTs, but to have arbitrary extensibility...
JU: This is what the semantic web folks are interested in, right? Having attributes scattered through a sparse matrix?
QC: That’s right. And that leads to another thing which we call column groups, which allow you to clump a few of them together and say, that’s a thing, I’m going to put a moniker on that and treat it as an equivalence class in some dimension...
It's not a new discussion, this problem is as old as dirt. Think Lotus Agenda/Notes, etc. I'm sure there are variations on this theme from the pre-relational 1970s as well, and probably the 1960s.
Even today variations of ancient hierarchical databases (Mumps, Cache, Epic Healthcare, etc) are valued in part because of their approaches to the sparse data/flexible attribute problem. So are attribute-value data stores in relational tables.
It's interesting to see how it all connects though ...
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