RE: Minutes of RDF DAWG telecon Tuesday 2004-06-08 for review

At 14:07 +0100 6/9/04, Seaborne, Andy wrote:
>>  > -- 3.10 Result Limits
>>  >
>>  > straw poll: who's convinced this is a requirements? are we close
>>  > to a decision here?
>>  AndyS: RDQL does not have a limit. Joseki provides limits.
>>  PatH: it could mean 2 things: I don't want more than 10 answers
>>    and the next ones after that or *just* 10
>
>It occurred to me that one way of differentiating between exactly 10 and
>more than 10 (and an unknown number) when we have "LIMIT 10" is to ask for
>11.  If 11 results return up, it is more than 10.  Otherwise, it is exact
>and 10 or less.  This is making the (trailing) flag we discussed a matter of
>whether the 11th slot gets filled at all.
>
>Hence, no requirement for a special flag and the client can decide whether
>to ask for 11 if it needes to know the difference.  It still might be a
>better design overall to have a flag.
>
>	Andy
[snip]

Andy - referring to two of your messages at the same time (this one 
and the one on streamable results) I wonder if both of these are 
needed -- a lot of query systems I've played for have protocols which 
work by returning the number of answers and the first one, and then 
have a mechanism for requesting the next N -  if we were to design 
that as the streamable interface, would there still be a need for 
3.10?
   -JH
  (note: in practice there is often something that keeps the system 
from having to actually count the results when there is a large 
number - usually just some flag that says "*many"" when the number is 
greater than some parameter -- that could either be in the design or 
could just be how people really implement for efficiency)
-- 
Professor James Hendler			  http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler
Director, Semantic Web and Agent Technologies	  301-405-2696
Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab.	  301-405-6707 (Fax)
Univ of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742	  240-277-3388 (Cell)

Received on Wednesday, 9 June 2004 17:55:32 UTC