[Fwd: Comments on Feb 20 Working Draft of SPARQL]

Sven,

I see some comments from a person at DERI sent to the comments list.
Does he know that DERI Innsbruck is in the WG?

As for this comment, please let us know what changes you think
should result from this it, and how we should respond
to any suggestions that you don't agree with. From a quick
scan, they all seem to be editorial. Are you happy for the editors
to dispose with them as they see fit?

In the future, I would prefer that comments from organizations that
are in the WG (Oracle, UMD, DERI Innsbruck, ... ) to come to the
WG mailing list. For comments on issues where the WG has
made a decision, I'll ask you to explain what information
we have not already considered.

-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
D3C2 887B 0F92 6005 C541  0875 0F91 96DE 6E52 C29E

attached mail follows:

Dear editors,

I have another set of minor comments on the SPARQL Query Language for RDF
working draft. Most of them are solely of editorial matter:

* first paragraph section 2: Combining tripleS gives a basic graph...

* I would suggest to exchange 2.1.7 and 2.1.6. In my opinion the query syntax is
based on the data format used and not vice versa.

* 2.9 should probably start with "RDF defines A reification vocabulary..."

* 5.4 should probably say "...; or it passes all solutions without adding any
additional bindings." The 'any solutions' seems wrong to me.

* Still 5.4 end: should OPTIONAL not be capitalized in the syntactic form example.

* 5.5 the second sentence of paragraph one is very confusing to read. Doesnt it
say exactly the same as the next sentence: "The outer optional graph
pattern..."? Could it may be make sense to mention that this basically means
that all varialbes in the outer graph patterns have to be bounded, doesnt it?

* End 5.5: the conclusion of the example is that the optional part is only
reached if there is a vcard:N predicate. Shouldnt it not also include a matching
vcard:Given predicate, as it ?vc vcard:Given ?gname is also part of the outer
graph pattern?
Small wording question: "the query only reaches these..." should IMHO be
"...reaches this...", as it refers to the optional graph pattern.

* Could it make sense to mention in 10.1.1 that projection is basically the
sequence modifier applied in all SELECT queries presented so far in the
document. Projection is basically the default modifier of SELECT, isnt it?

* In 10.4.3 first sentence you mention that the output of DESCRIBE is determined
by the information publisher. Who or what is the information provider? Is it the
query service that provides the information to a user or rather the entity that
actually published the information. If I publish my foaf file and it is accessed
over a SPARQL interface I would expect that I am the publisher, however in my
opinion it is not clear how I could influence the DESCRIBE output besides using
the same blank node as subject of related statements (cf. CBD)

* In 11: is there a reason why xsd:dateTime is in another font than the other
datatypes?

* In the listing of 11.2 there is twice a redundant "will return" for logical or
and logical and

* in 11.3 for example XPath is written as xpath. i also observed that sometimes
cannot is written in two words.


Thank you very much for reading, I hope it helps a bit to finalize the working
draft.

Best regards,

reto

-- 
dipl.ing.EPFL
Reto Krummenacher, Project Assistant

Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI)
University of Innsbruck

Phone: +43 (0)512 507 6452
Fax:   +43 (0)512 507 9872

reto.krummenacher@deri.org
http://members.deri.at/~retok