Re: SPARQL transitive closure discussion

and, to end my part of the thread, thanks to Satya for pointing out the 
W3C working draft on Property Paths (which I was not aware of)
which contains a very similar proposal for an explicit closure operator:
> Find the names of all the people that can be reached from Alice by 
> foaf:knows:
>
> {
>   ?x foaf:mbox <mailto:alice@example> .
>   ?x foaf:knows+/foaf:name ?name .
>  }
-Paolo