RE: Bookmarkable queries

Having query requests as URLs as two effects:
 * web caching using the existing deployed cache servers
 * recording a query so it can be reused or passed on to another system to
use.

Bookmarking is the second effect.  

Whether caching will be significant, when applied to general queries, I
don't know.  The same query can be written syntactically in many different
ways so just string comparison isn't much help although if it is the same
application running ob different machines it is going to generate the
syntactic forms.

A very smart server could maintain a cache of part of the dataset, if we had
an recommended format but the world of semantic web caches is some way off.


If the query is on the server and just needs some parameters, then isn't
this a case of a normal GET with a query string to provide the paramters?
That is, existing mechanisms apply.  Caching is likely as the parameterized
query has its own URL and the parameters are the HTTP query string.

It would benefit from one thing though - a MIME type or other way of
specifying the form for the results.

	Andy


-------- Original Message --------
> From: Farrukh Najmi <>
> Date: 14 May 2004 16:13
> 
> Rob Shearer wrote:
> 
> > I think requirement 3.8 brings up major questions about just what we
> > consider a "query". Does a "query" include a selection of the RDF
> > source, or can the same query be executed against different sources?
> > (The latter seems much more sensible to me...)
> > 
> > It makes a lot of sense to make clear that a query should be encodable
> > as text, and that requirement implicitly means that a query can be
> > encoded *within* a URI, but that's a long way from saying that a query
> > *is* a URI. The requirement as written conjures notions of new schemes
> > and URLs and protocol dependence and all the rest.
> > 
> > At the very very least, I'd suggest changing "...a query as a URI."
> > to "...a query within a URI." 
> > 
> > 
> One possible way a query could be bookmarked as a URI is as a URI to a
> query that is stored in a repository.
> The ebXML Registry allows queries to be stored within the server as a
> parameterized query. A client can
> invoke the query simply by identifying it with a URI and providing
> parameters to the query. This is similar
> in concept to stored queries in a relational database. If the client
> does not provide some parameters then the
> ebXML Registry drops the predicates for which parameters are not
> provided. 
> 
> The above use case seems to be a combination of:
> 
> 3.2 Variable Bindings Result, and
> 3.8 Bookmarkable Queries
> 
> Is my interpretation correct?

Received on Monday, 17 May 2004 05:02:18 UTC