Re: SPARQL Query Results XML Format

Hi Alan,

I share your pain; we've already had to resort to using the link element
in a hackish way and it would have been much better to have been able to
embed metadata directly in the query results.

I'm also with Danny on the namespaces / RDF embedding, in that that's
what RDF is all about.  My main caveat being that the SPARQL query
results format is currently easy to parse and embedding RDF in there
will just make things harder for everyone.

This last point is worth stressing, as so far we've found it relatively
easy to use SPARQL XML results in different applications using e.g.
JAXB, Javascript and XSL-T.  While I'm an RDF believer, I think that
bringing it back in to the query results at this stage it would just
make things harder and scare people off what is generally a good spec.

As for the spec, it's quite late in the day to really change anything,
but I'd certainly vote for a minor addition along the lines of a <meta>
element as a dual of the <link> element.  Since any metadata introduced
in this way should be about the query response itself, and not about any
data returned by the query, the syntax could be quite lightweight but
still have the RDF qualities Danny mentioned.

Alex.

Received on Tuesday, 18 September 2007 19:03:30 UTC