RE: DESCRIBE with GRAPH

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Richard Newman [mailto:r.newman@reading.ac.uk]
> Sent: Sunday, May 20, 2007 10:08 PM
> To: Geoff Chappell
> Cc: public-rdf-dawg-comments@w3.org
> Subject: Re: DESCRIBE with GRAPH
> 
> > I realized that DESCRIBE is somewhat loosely defined, but wondering
> > what
> > other implementations have done in this situation. Any guidance
> > appreciated....
> 
> As an implementer: I would expect the DESCRIBE to run against the
> dataset specified by the FROM/FROM NAMED, not just the contributing
> graphs, and certainly not the whole store. As to what the
> implementation should do with the named/default dichotomy... well,
> that'll be implementation-defined.

Thanks for the feedback. 

Here's my use case:

	http://www.semanticwebsearch.com/query/sparql.rsp

In this case, I'd expect no federation, but would want descriptions to be
graph-bound. OTOH, I can also see cases where I'd want it to behave as you
suggest. 

DESCRIBE has no way to distinguish these cases since it uses up all of the
available language features to specify what subjects to describe, but has no
way to then say how to generate the descriptions (or where to pull them
from). So perhaps we'll just have context specific behavior until it gets
some more definition? (BTW, even with its shortcomings, I think we're better
off with it, then without it).

-Geoff

Received on Monday, 21 May 2007 11:04:41 UTC