- From: Richard Newman <r.newman@reading.ac.uk>
- Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2007 20:01:30 -0700
- To: Joshua Tauberer <jt@occams.info>
- Cc: carmen <_@whats-your.name>, semantic-web@w3.org
> I've always wondered why SPARQL or other RDF queries were not
> represented in RDF.....
... because RDF isn't particularly human-writable, syntax helps a lot
of people when they're writing, and SPARQL wouldn't benefit a great
deal from extensibility*.
It also appears that SPARQL's design goals included "looking like SQL".
Certainly, it's easier to write something like
SELECT * { ?x a ?y }
than
[ a sparql:Query ;
sparql:vars sparql:all ;
sparql:queryBody [
a sparql:BasicGraphPattern ;
sparql:patterns (
[ a sparql:Pattern ;
sparql:subject [ a sparql:Variable;
sparql:label "x" ] ;
sparql:predicate rdf:type ;
sparql:object [ a sparql:Variable;
sparql:label "y" ] ) ] ]
Now, why SPARQL has a free-text syntax rather than s-expressions is
something that many of us have wondered for a long time...
-R
* extensibility might let you do all sorts of things, but it would
hinder interoperability of queries, which wouldn't be beneficial
(particularly early in SPARQL's life).
Received on Friday, 15 June 2007 03:02:21 UTC