Re: SPARQL: Charmod conformance [OK?]

* Dan Connolly wrote:
>OK, we're adding a reference to charmod; in the editor's draft,
>you may find:
>
> A. SPARQL Grammar
>
>A SPARQL query string is a character string (c.f. section 6.1 String
>concepts of [CHARMOD]) in the language defined by the following grammar,
>starting with the Query production. 

This does not actually require conformance to Charmod for SPARQL
documents (queries), so I don't think this meets the requirements
of the Character model Recommendation. My understanding is that
the specification must include a requirement like

  SPARQL query strings must comply with all requirements for
  content defined in [CHARMOD].

to conform to the relevant charmod requirement. The reference to
Unicode is an improvement though, but there are some issues that
I'll raise in a separate comment.

>As to implementations, the QL spec just specifies the semantics of
>the language; it doesn't specify any software components. The last
>call draft had a few references to implementations, but those
>have been removed from the editors draft (in v 1.442) in response
>to a few of the comments you made.
>
>The protocol spec (still in progress) specifies a network protocol
>between components. For example...

My understanding is that the SPARQL query language can be implemented
independently of the SPARQL protocol, so there is a class of software
that implements SPARQL only based on requirements implied by the se-
mantics of the query language. Such implementations are not currently
required to conform to the Character model. My understanding is that
text such as

  SPARQL implementations must comply with all requirements for
  implementations defined in [CHARMOD]. Note that for software
  that generates SPARQL queries this implies a requirement to
  comply with the requirements for content as well.

is required in order to comply with the Charmod specification. I'm
not sure though whether the I18N WG considered specifications that
define conformance for implementations implicitly when defining the
character model, I'm happy to defer to the I18N Core WG in this issue.
-- 
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Received on Monday, 1 August 2005 18:31:05 UTC