SPARQL Protocol and Unicode characters

Dear all,

The SPARQL Protocol as described at [1] suggests that SPARQL queries are 
going to be sent over the line as simple www-urlencoded strings. I would
like to point out that we have tried this approach in Sesame and that it
fails to handle multi-byte characters properly [2]. Main reason for this
is that the used %xx patterns cannot encode any byte values larger than
255.

In Sesame, we "solved" this issue by switching to multipart/form-data
encoded POST requests. Main drawback of this solution is that we use
POST-requests all the time, even when GET-requests would be more
natural. Another option would be to enforce an UTF-8 characters-to-
octets mapping to the query before adding it as a parameter value.

Hope you can use this feedback to improve the protocol.

Regards,

Arjohn Kampman


[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-protocol/
[2] http://www.openrdf.org/issues/secure/ViewIssue.jspa?key=SES-84


-- 
arjohn.kampman@aduna.biz
Aduna BV - http://aduna.biz/
Prinses Julianaplein 14-b, 3817 CS Amersfoort, The Netherlands
tel. +31-(0)33-4659987  fax. +31-(0)33-4659987

Received on Thursday, 3 February 2005 15:11:00 UTC