Re: ANN: SPARQL-DL query engine for the OWL API

On Mar 3, 2011 Holger Knublauch wrote:
>
> On Mar 6, 2011, at 7:20 AM, Thorsten Liebig wrote:
>
>> Michael Schneider wrote:
>>> Holger Knublauch wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hi Thorsten (and others),
>>>>
>>>> have you considered that SPARQL-DL may not be a good name for a
>>>> technology that has an entirely different syntax and semantics from
>>>> SPARQL? When I looked at this, I expected to find a DL-friendly subset
>>>> of SPARQL. But this is not what SPARQL-DL is.
>>>>
>>>> I believe there is enough confusion on the marketplace already. Why not
>>>> call it something like OWL-QL?
>>>
>>> Because there already is an "OWL QL" query language:
>>>
>>> <http://www.ksl.stanford.edu/projects/owl-ql/>
>>>
>>> ... and because there is now also an "OWL 2 QL" ontology language:
>>>
>>> <http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/REC-owl2-profiles-20091027/#OWL_2_QL>
>>>
>>> Good names are rare and precious. ;-)
>>
>> Absolutely right.
>
> My suggestion was "something like OWL QL" - I do know that this
> particular name was already taken, but this is just a red herring. It
> should be very doable to find a more appropriate name. Is DLQL already
> taken?
>
>
>> Furthermore, the term "SPARQL-DL" is not our invention. The name has
>> its seeds in a OWLED '07 paper from Sirin and Parsia that introduced a
>> subset of SPARQL for OWL DL. Our implementation basically is an
>> extension of this query language wrt. OWL 2 on top of the OWL API.
>
> If the original SPARQL-DL was still a subset of SPARQL then this used to
> be an appropriate name. However, none of the example queries on your
> SPARQL-DL page are valid SPARQL, e.g.
>
>    SELECT ?x
>       WHERE { Transitive(?p),
>               PropertyValue(<http://example.com#myClass>, ?p, ?x) }
>
>    PREFIX wine:<http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/PR-owl-guide-20031209/wine#>
>     SELECT ?i
>       WHERE { Type(?i, wine:PinotBlanc) }
>       OR WHERE { Type(?i, wine:DryRedWine) }
>
> This is no longer a subset of SPARQL, and calling it SPARQL-DL will IMHO
> cause problems and be counter-productive for all parties involved. As a
> tool vendor we will be facing questions as to whether our SPARQL support
> is incomplete because we don't support "SPARQL-DL". And you will be
> asked about support for aggregations, sub-selects, built-in functions
> and all other features of SPARQL 1.1. Do you really want to be answering
> all those questions for the rest of your life? Only because you use
> SELECT and WHERE does not make it SPARQL.
>
> Thanks for your consideration
> Holger

The incomplete feature overlap between SPARQL and SPARQL-DL might indeed 
cause misconceptions on user side. We therefore intend to follow 
Holger's request and suggest SPOQL (Simple Protocol and OWL Query 
Language) as new name -- that disassociate it from SPARQL but does not 
claim to stand for an universal conjunctive query language for OWL. We 
will keep the reference to the SPARQL-DL proposal of course. @Bijan: 
Does this sound ok for you as one of the authors of the original work?
Thanks for your valuable feedback Holger.
Thorsten

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