[WN, SPARQL, ALL] Describe

SPARQL has a number of result forms, i.e. structures for returning the
results of a query.  One of them is called DESCRIBE in which the server
selects a subgraph to return that 'describes' a given resource.  DAWG
are specifically asking for feedback on this mechanism as they have not
reached consensus.  The issue is whether this functionality should be
part of SPARQL or should be a separate query language.  As I understand
things, they are defining a query protocol for sending queries and
getting results, and that protocol can support multiple query languages,
one of which is SPARQL.

It occurs to me that DESCRIBE is the sort of thing that a Wordnet server
might support.  If an application wished to get a useful subgraph about
a word or a synset, asking the server to DESCRIBE it and let the server
return a subgraph that is likely to be useful.  This would also get
around issues to do with '#''s and '/'s in URI's, and could be resolved
in one network latency avoiding the redirect resulting from
http-range-14.  It also allows there to be multiple Wordnet servers,
allows a standard way to access them, eliminates a single point of
failure and endless hassle sorting out domain names if things go wrong.

If we think this would be useful functionality for Wordnet, we could
make that comment to DAWG.  The question then arises whether that
functionality would be useful to us independently of the rest of SPARQL
and whether it would be useful to us as part of SPARQL.  If we had a
view on that, it might be helpful to DAWG.

So a position for discussion:

1. The DESCRIBE functionality would be useful for Wordnet.

2. It would be useful stand alone, not as part of SPARQL.

3. It would also be useful as part of SPARQL, but less so.  An example
might be a query that queried multiple Wordnets for different languages
for "chat" and returned dscriptions of each of the word senses.

Brian

Received on Saturday, 3 December 2005 21:16:52 UTC