Re: DESCRIBE with GRAPH

Geoff Chappell wrote:
> 
>> -----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).

Agreed.

One at the moment is to use the protocol request and add extra parameters - 
that means the request has additional information for the query even though 
it's not in the SPARQL query string itself.  For example, some systems allow 
adding "output=" to get JSON in a compatible way with AJAX, or including in 
the request that an XSLT stylesheet be included as either a server-side 
process or a stylesheet inclusion.

	Andy

> 
> -Geoff
> 
> 

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Received on Tuesday, 22 May 2007 10:33:05 UTC