Re: Innovation, community and queries

On 2002-06-01 0:22, "ext Danny Ayers" <danny666@virgilio.it> wrote:

> 
>> properties(@"x:spam")
>> @"x:spam" - properties() -> *
> 
> Another good reason for an RDF QL in RDF!
> 
> Seriously though, I do think such a QL would be extremely useful, not only
> because it would generally help interop.  It would also mean that a whole
> range of common expressions could become easier in RDF (without having to
> drop into DAML-land), and also make things like XSLT-ish transformations a
> lot more straightforward. Not unrelated to the interop point, the ability to
> save sets of queries in a common format like RDF/XML has to be a plus - same
> parser etc etc.

Exactly. While XML representations are well, er rather obese, to put it
nicely ;-)  there is great benefit from using a standardized representation
that has broad tools support -- and also broad understanding by the
community.

Every RDF query engine that I see has it's own QL. Some of those engines
are very good at one thing, but not so good at another, so I may wish
to leverage several such engines in various application areas -- but I'm
not about to try to get folks here to learn umpteen different query
languages, and while I tend to pick up languages pretty easily, I also
don't want to have too many to deal with on a regular basis.

If certain folks want to dis around with their own personal notations
(e.g. N3 ;-) that's great -- but that's not going to promote global
compatability and encourage the growth of a tools industry to support
it.

There's a reason why we have all these standards ;-)

Cheers,

Patrick
 
--
               
Patrick Stickler              Phone: +358 50 483 9453
Senior Research Scientist     Fax:   +358 7180 35409
Nokia Research Center         Email: patrick.stickler@nokia.com