Working on domain specific indexes

So … what is involved in a “simple change” like what I wrote about yesterday?

First you add support for annotating the domain specific index in the ontology files. This is straight forward as we of course have a generic Turtle parser, and it’s just a matter of adding properties to certain classes, and filling the values from the ontology in in the instances in our in-memory representation of the ontology. You of course also need to change the CREATE-TABLE statements. Trivial.

Then you implement detecting changes in the ontology. And more complex; coping with the changes. This means doing ALTER on the SQL tables. You also need to copy from the InformationElement table to the MusicPiece table (I’m using MusicPiece to clarify, it’s of course generic) in case of such a domain specific index being added during an ontology change, and put an implicit index on the column. After all, that index is why we’re doing this.

I finished those two yesterday. I have not finished detecting a deletion of a domain specifix index yet. That will have to ALTER the table with a DROP of the column. The most difficult here is detecting the deletion itself. We don’t yet have any code to diff on multivalue properties in the ontology (the ontology is a collection of RDF statements like everything else, describing itself).

Today I finished writing copy values to the MusicPiece table’s mirror column

Next few days will be about adapting the SPARQL engine and of course coping with a deletion of a domain specific index. And then testing, and again testing. Mind that this has to work from a journal replay situation too. In which case no ontology is involved (it’s all stored in the history of the persistent journal).

Where’s my Redbull? Ah, waiting for me in the fridge. Good!