Hi All --

The working draft section  http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-dawg-uc/#d4.1  suggests that there should be a human-friendly syntax for a future RDF query language.

One can drill down a bit on this, and ask -- "what kind of human?"  and "fixed set of keywords, as in SQL, or open vocabulary?" 

The usual "human friendly" assumption is that this means "programmer friendly", although most humans are not programmers.  So, there's an opportunity here to see if a future query language could be made friendly for non-programmers.  We could call this Human-friendly, with a capital H.

The usual assumption is also to limit a query language definition to have a fixed set of keywords.  This means that there is little in the way of application semantics that can be expressed -- all of that is relegated to an application layer, as in say, Java programs over SQL.

Is there an opportunity at this stage of the working draft to take an approach that is friendly for the majority of Humans, and that can capture more application domain semantics than usual?

A possible approach is described by some examples in

            http://www.reengineeringllc.com/demo_agents/RDFQueryLangComparison1.agent

As you may see in the examples, a considerable amount of domain knowledge gets written down in executable form in the process of defining the queries.  Moreover, the vocabulary is open.  This allows, amongst other things, for Human friendly explanations of how query results are arrived at.  (Without this, even in simple examples, deducation chains over RDF quickly become hard for programmers to follow, let alone Humans.)

There is a possible administrative level  stumbling block though.  The suggested approach uses rules , which at first sight are out of scope for dawg.  (This note is cc-ed to www-rdf-rules).

>From the technical point of view, do folks think the above is a good approach?  If so, is there a way around the possible administrative level  stumbling block?

                                                          Cheers,   -- Adrian Walker


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