Re: DBpedia now available as triple pattern fragments

Hi John,

> However can also be frustrating not to know when the page will finish loading.

Good point! We could probably derive heuristics.

> I don't see anything preventing a SPARQL endpoint from streaming results when possible (e.g. When no ORDER BY clause is present).

Sure; nothing holds SPARQL endpoints back from streaming their result;
even if there is an ORDER BY clause, they might still stream because of indexes.
But i haven't experienced streaming yet on any public SPARQL endpoint
(let me know if you see one).

This also reaches a fundamental point about how we ask queries.
When you ask a server to solve a SPARQL query,
you might not be concerned about adding possibly blocking operators
such as  SORT BY / MIN / GROUP BY / …
The query paradigm is “ask – wait – do” anyway,
so whether you or the server perform that blocking operations doesn't matter.

However, things change if clients execute queries,
where the paradigm becomes “ask – do as results arrive”.
Maybe it's better then to drop the blocking operators,
and to just perform them in an iterative way.
For instance: lists can dynamically resort as new items arrive,
instead of having to wait until the final, sorted result is ready.

Best,

Ruben

Received on Saturday, 1 November 2014 19:35:46 UTC