External Storage of Queries

Dear RDF Data Access Working Group,

  From http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/WD-rdf-dawg-uc-20040602/ it is not
clear to me whether you think that users will desire to store queries
as separate resources, i.e., as files or HTTP delivered resources. It
seems however likely that they will, e.g. to provide users of software
products based on such a query language the ability to access the
queries elsewhere, to modify them or to provide their own queries. Or
they just want to get the queries out of their sight.

If you consider this desirable, this seems to motivate a requirement to
provide a MIME type for query documents and to think about the digital
representation of queries, i.e., software that reads queries from
external digital resources would need to determine the character
encoding of the resource.

Considering that queries likely get rather lengthy due to long URIs
and such, I would certainly favour the possibility of externally stored
queries and would thus propose it as a use case which then motivates a
Requirement to register a new MIME type for the query language and
unless the syntax is XML-based to sort out character encoding issues.

For the latter I would then encourage the Working Group to avoid
allowing any other character encoding than UTF-8 just like Notation3
did so far, with the exception that I would further encourage you to
allow such a document to start with a byte order mark.

See http://www.w3.org/2002/06/registering-mediatype for details on W3C's
MIME Type procedures and http://www.w3.org/TR/charmod/#sec-Encodings for
more information on choosing a character encoding for new formats.

regards.

Received on Tuesday, 13 July 2004 00:40:04 UTC