From and With

I have just finished implementing a SPARQL engine for accessing RDF in 
Mozilla (not personally affiliated). This was intended to provide a 
robust way to
access RDF configuration files for an IDE I am building.

One of the attractions of SPARQL was the way graphs could be aggregated 
using WITH, and
the way the GRAPH clause could navigate to other graphs either using the 
FROM clause or using query variables.
(Aside: I maintain that the FROM/WITH names were cross wired).

This was a perfect fits with the Mozilla RDF implementation.

 I now find that FROM and WITH clauses have now been removed - this is 
really unfortunate. The reason given, that dynamic graph loading
would be required it not compelling. In fact the opposite is the case. 
If I have a graph (of IDE configuration data) which references one (or 
more) graph over the web, each time I visit the remote graph(s) it may 
reference other different graphs on each occasion.  The new restriction 
renders SPARQL useless for my requirements.

Dynamic graph reference was SPARQL's strong point, and is an inescapable 
part of being on the web  - Please don't throw it away for temporary 
convenience.

Peter Wilson

Received on Saturday, 9 April 2005 05:16:39 UTC