Upsert operator

[jacoscaz]

Hi all,

I’ve been looking at the RDF patch format for use within an experimental IoT project based on RDF. The format looks very promising but, in the interest of conciseness, I was looking for something that would allow me to “upsert” a triple with a different object term without separate A and D entries.

For example, given a store with <Alice> foaf:knows <Bob> ., I’d be looking for something like

U <Alice> foaf:knows <Peter> .

to replace

D <Alice> foaf:knows <Bob> .
A <Alice> foaf:knows <Peter> . 

Does anything like that exist? If so, has it ever been considered within RDF patch? Are there other approaches I should be looking into?

[afs]

It's not so clear cut - suppose

<Alice> foaf:knows <Bob> .
<Alice> foaf:knows <Charlie> .

how does the upsert know which, or both, triples is the intended target?

This is what SPARQL Update comes in - the WHERE clause can include conditions, FILTERs.

RDF patch is the record of changes. It can even be made reversible if the application tests, when generating the patch, whether D or A operations have an effect.

There is LDpatch but it only operates on RDF of a specific shape (LDP data is a tree if using blank nodes).

SPARQLPatch is a subset of SPARQL Update to make implementation lighter.