Design Review of SPARQL query editor's draft $Revision: 1.293 $ of $Date: 2005/04/05 14:26:19 $

I should probably extract some higher level design issues from my review.

I found it confusing when the word "pattern" was used alone whether it
meant triple patterns, graph patterns (or rarely), query patterns.  The
definition of graph pattern is scattered and hard to grasp.

Related to that, is that value constraints aren't clearly either
a graph pattern, part of a graph pattern or part of just one graph
pattern (Basic Pattern probably).

Several of the formal definitions I found hard to read and instead
used the text and examples in preference.  It would be good if all
the examples were given numbers, anchors and appeared in separate
files so they could be tested externally.  I put some of the earlier
ones in the test suite for this purpose but I don't know if they have
been updated to match.

I found it rather hard to follow the 10.1 explanation of how to take
a variable-binding result (set) and manipulate it.  This can include
turning it into a sequence and operating on that sequence (ORDER BY,
LIMIT, OFFSET) but the process wasn't entirely clear.  It also should
clearly say - this is for SELECT results only.  If CONSTRUCT,
DESCRIBE or ASK can use these terms, it probably would be better done
in their respective sections.

DESCRIBE is looking rather odd, as I learnt it wasn't quite what I
thought it was having read through the document fully.

I still miss WITH/FROM as it's an obvious omission to not say how to
form the data being queried.

The expression stuff including datatypes is just working on the
detail and looks on the right track, I can't see any big problems
with the current approach.

Dave

Received on Thursday, 7 April 2005 15:09:42 UTC