RE: Objective 4.6 -- additional semantic information

> Rob - I've been suspecting you and I have been misunderstanding one 
> another on this, now I'm sure of it.  Not quite sure where we're off, 
> so let me ask two questions
>    1 -  in your opinion, what does objective 4.6 add -- that 
> is, if we 
> accomplished this objective what would be in the language that isn't 
> there in the design that doesn't include it?

I think that a very valid objective is to try to make this query
language the basis of querying for the entire semantic stack, which uses
RDF as its data model. All these other languages will do nothing but
describe RDF data models (without necessarily explicitly instantiating
those data models), so it makes sense for a query language which asks
questions about RDF data models to be relevent to all those other
languages.

> Are you implying below 
> that if we don't reach the objective it will be "wrong" for a query 
> of an RDFS store to return the ?x = c answer below?

There is a very real sense in which 'c' is *not* an answer to your
query. If you're just querying the RDF (and not employing RDFS) then
returning 'c' would be incorrect.
In your simple example, there is another "virtual" RDF graph in which
'c' is an answer. To be honest, I don't think the standard needs to
address this concern; constructing a virtual graph, or writing an
implementation which can query such a virtual graph without fully
constructing it, is beyond the group's scope (in my opinion, of course,
but I think this was the intent of the charter).

However, there are cases (one of which I have presented here) in which
there is knowledge about an RDF graph which can't simply be represented
in a new virtual graph. Knowing that our language can be used as a basis
for querying this knowledge would certainly go a long way toward
justifying "yet another semantic web standard", as some have summarized
our goals.

>   2 - .  The UC&R doesn't have any use case that seems to really 
> motivate disjunctive queries and the charter says that the 
> expressivity (using disjunct as an example) will be determined by use 
> cases. 

I must admit that upon re-reading the UC&R doc I am a bit surprised that
disjunction has fallen off the radar. I certainly think users like being
able to form arbitrary boolean constructions.

In truth, we had a few use cases which went did demonstrate this
functionality, but they don't seem to have made it into the doc. I
certainly don't think that document should be viewed as a comprehensive
list, but rather as a starting point and a milestone in both our
internal discussion and our interaction with outside groups.
But as Kendall points out, I can only speak for myself.

> In my experience most query languages don't actually handle 
> disjunctive queries very well (SQL, for example, only allows the OR 
> in the conditional of a return, which is a very limited kind of OR).

I don't entirely understand this, and I'm curious. I had always rather
assumed that WHERE clauses could contain arbitrary boolean combinations
of predicates. Am I misunderstanding you, or am I misunderstanding SQL?
 
> I think the reason for this is that a lot of the complex border cases 
> seem to arise around disjunctive queries (as in the case below) - so 
> my question is really whether you see this as a trade-off, or if you 
> take it as a given that a good DA rec would include" (a R b) OR (c S 
> d)" and thus worry about a lot of these complex cases?

I think the complex cases cases are actually not that difficult in a
closed-world system. For plain RDF triples, I don't see performing
queries with 'or' as a problem. In cases where more sophisticated
languages complicate the issue, the complications only arise when you're
actually getting the benefit of the new system. If features like
disjunction are so rarely useful, then I fear a lot of us have wasted a
lot of time defining whole new languages like OWL and SWRL for
expressing things that are even more esoteric!

>   thanks
>   JH
> p.s. if either of the above sound hostile or argumentative, please 
> don't take them that way -- I haven't been privy to the discussions 
> of the group to date, and am trying to catch up - I'm trying to read 
> the message log, but there's too much to simply read end to end, so 
> i'm trying to catch up on the most relevant threads, and thus may 
> have missed things where the above were discussed.

Shame. Hostile and argumentative work environments are rather my milieu.

> At 8:47 -0700 6/9/04, Rob Shearer wrote:
> >>  Maybe I didn't understand what 4.6 was about, I assumed it was
> >>  something like this:
> >>
> >>  if I have
> >>     a rdfs:subClassOf b
> >>     b rdfs:subClassOf c
> >>
> >>  then I was assuming that the requirments in UC&R would 
> imply that if
> >>  I query for
> >>     a rdfs:subClassOf ?x
> >>  then ?x would be bound to b
> >>  however, if we include 4.6, then we would be expected to return
> >>     ?x = b and ?x = c
> >
> >I think it would be wrong to require implementations to 
> return both 'b'
> >and 'c', because that would be *requiring* implementations to process
> >RDFS.
> >But I think it would also be wrong to forbid returning 'b' 
> and 'c' from
> >queries against some larger knowledgebase. In this case the 
> problem is
> >hard to produce, since most (every?) extra piece of RDFS can 
> simply be
> >encoded as a whole bunch of extra triples in an RDF graph, but that's
> >not the case for all extra sources of knowledge.
> >
> >For example, if the standard were to define disjunction such that the
> >predicate "(a R b) OR (c S d)" is defined to return 'true' 
> if and only
> >if "a R b" returns 'true' or "c S d" returns 'true', then it's
> >impossible for a standards-compliant processor to return sensible
> >results in a situation where the disjunction is a logical 
> consequence of
> >the knowledgebase, yet neither of the individual triples is.
> >
> >If, however, the standard were written in terms of the 
> semantics of the
> >graphs which match such a disjunctive predicate, then more advanced
> >processors could legally return results that actually represented all
> >the knowledge at their disposal.
> >
> >This is the difference between specifying the semantics of the query
> >language and specifying its implementation.
> 
> -- 
> 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 20:01:07 UTC