Re: Proposed Resolution for Issue 42

Hi Enrico,

On 3 Jun 2011, at 07:27, Enrico Franconi wrote:
> many people don't care to "keep" the meaning of the information of the source relational data. Many people are just happy with a data structure to manipulate, without telling the users how to possibly reconstruct the original RDB meaning from the data structure.

Well, not quite. As we both know, it is not possible to keep the meaning of the information, because the logic of RDF cannot express that meaning.

The question is not about preserving the meaning; the question is about preserving the ability to write every SQL query (including those that do weird shit with NULLs) into a SPARQL query that returns exactly the same result. You insist on being able to do that, and I don't see what that's useful for.

Show me an implementer or user who cares about preserving the SQL semantics of NULLs. Seriously, show me just one. I have not seen the slightest shred of evidence that anyone except yourself cares about this. And as far as I can tell (and I apologise if I'm mistaken here) you don't care as an implementer or user, but because of a desire for theoretical purity.

> Well, I will strongly oppose that.

And I will strongly oppose any proposal that puts theoretical purity before the concerns of users and implementers.

I acknowledge that theoretical purity is valuable. However, in standardization work it cannot be the driving force. Letting a standard be driven by that, rather than by a focus on addressing use cases, solving user problems, and alleviating implementation concerns, is a sure way of dooming it to irrelevance. Recent technology history, including W3C's, is full of examples for that.

> At least, I demand that people who do care should not suffer for the choices of the group.
> After all, we are just discussing whether a NULL value should be absent or encoded in the translation. I don't understand why we want to make the life difficult to the ones who do care.

Because we don't want to make life difficult for those who don't care, which means basically everyone.

> If somebody really don't want to see the NULLs, it is always possible to filter them out in a very easy way.

If someone wants to see them, it's always possible to add them in. I believe that's a single SPARQL CONSTRUCT query.

Best regards,
Richard

Received on Friday, 3 June 2011 13:27:01 UTC