Re: RDF Query -- possible WG charter draft for discussion

Some quick points of feedback concerning the RDF Query charter draft.

First of all: the charter seems very open, which I like very much.
Considering the wide variety of proposals out there, I'm happy to
see that none are being dismissed beforehand. The big disadvantage
is that I have very little to comment on :)

I'll give it a go nevertheless:

I find it somewhat disappointing that RDFS semantics are completely
out of scope. I know it's supposed to be baby steps, but in my
opinion things like class- and property subsumption are now
sufficiently well-described (and there is enough experience in
implementing them) to enable support for them in a QL. Moreover, not
adding this in the QL formal model, but allowing for different
implementations to add it 'on their own' (which seems to be what the
draft charter suggests in section 2.1 [1]), will result in different
implementations giving very different answers to the same query. I
think that this is undesirable, but YMMV.

I'm also missing something about result set format and syntax. U
think that creating a norm for these is at least as (if not more)
important for interoperability.

 From the perspective of compositionality I would prefer a query
language design that returns subgraph matches (or transformed
graphs) instead of/next to variable bindings. But I'm running ahead
of the charter here.

Jeen

[1] As an editorial comment: section 2.1 was clear as mud to me, to
be honest. For example, what does the phrase "The [WG] may find it
trivial to produce a query mechanism that illustrates the semantics
of terms in RDFS or OWL" mean? Trivial?
-- 
jeen@aduna.biz
Aduna (formerly Aidministrator b.v.) - http://www.aduna.biz
Julianaplein 14b, 3817 CS Amersfoort, The Netherlands
tel. +31-(0)33-4659987, fax. +31-(0)33-4659987

Received on Tuesday, 11 November 2003 05:50:55 UTC