Re: FEATURE: SPARQLX

Bijan Parsia wrote:
> http://www.w3.org/2009/sparql/wiki/SPARQLX
> 
> There are two flavor of proposal on the table:
> 
>     The old SPARQLX proposal:
>         
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-dawg/2005JanMar/0414.html
>     An RDF based proposal:
>         
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-dawg-comments/2009Mar/0010.html 
> 
> 
> I personally do not find an RDF/XML syntax to meet my requirements 
> (since RDF/XML doesn't play that well with the XML toolchain), though an 
> RDF based syntax may be desirable for other reasons.

I have two concerns with the SPARQLX proposed feature:

1) Is it currently implemented anywhere? Looking through the old 
discussions it sounds like Kendall was going to be implementing it; do 
you know if he did? do you know if anyone else did?

2) As the query language evolves, so too will the XML syntax have to 
evolve. This puts a small burden on any people extending the language in 
the future, but more than that, what's the latest state-of-the-art with 
respect to evolving XML schemas? Does extending a schema as the language 
extends break backwards compatibility for tools that validate against an 
older schema? (As you can probably tell, I'm not much of an XML-head, so 
apologies if this question is non-sensical.)

(FWIW, while these are concerns, they're both mild concerns. On the flip 
side, I've been asked about XML serializations of SPARQL repeatedly in 
the past, so I think there is sufficient demand for it.)

To me, the RDF syntax proposed by Holger has the benefit that there is 
one implementation of it and the start of a 'specification', but I 
haven't heard much clamor elsewhere for an RDF serialization.

Just my initial thoughts in advance of discussing this on next week's 
telecon.

Lee