Why are we using lists so extensively?

[aaronc]

RDF lists are useful if we need to have an ordered collection of elements. However, they make the data harder to query if we don't care about order (traversing over rdf:first and rdf:rest as opposed to simply binding ?s ?p ?o). It seems like we're almost always using lists in these schemas whenever there may be more than one element. Are these really all ordered collections?

One guess I have is that we are using ordered lists to define a UI order but in that case I think we are not being clear enough about what the responsibility of our data is. Order in a UI is a presentational detail whereas order in something like metadata implies a semantic order. But if there is no semantic order then we are mixing concerns - presentational order should be a database concern whereas semantic order should be the only relevant thing in semantic data.

[clevinson]

Generally this makes sense to me. I'd be in favor of us getting rid of lists where it felt unecessary.

[blushi]

We should look at the existing data and check where it does make sense to keep using linked lists.