Re: UUID String Function

Stephen,

Thank you for the comment.

The working group agrees that there are use case where such a function 
would be useful. The functions UUID(), which generates a URN UUID IRI, 
and StrUUID(), which generates the string format for a UUID, have been 
added to the SPARQL function library.

http://www.w3.org/2009/sparql/docs/query-1.1/rq25.xml#func-uuid
http://www.w3.org/2009/sparql/docs/query-1.1/rq25.xml#func-struuid

We would be grateful if you would acknowledge that your comment has been 
addressed by sending a message to this list.

	Andy
	On behalf of SPARQL-WG

On 06/02/12 18:41, Stephen Allen wrote:
> This is a comment for the "SPARQL 1.1 Query Language" working draft
> (05 January 2012) [1] and the "SPARQL 1.1 Update) working draft (05
> January 2012) [2].
>
> One useful feature I would like to see in SPARQL is a string function
> that returns a 128 bit UUID (as defined by [3]).  This could be used
> to construct IRIs [4] or string literals.  In particular, this would
> assist greatly in minting new resources in a query for entities that
> may not otherwise lend themselves to a good naming scheme.
>
> Relational databases currently supply this functionality (see [5],
> [6]).  I don't believe the implementation cost would be very high, as
> libraries exist in many languages to generate UUIDs.  The particular
> RFC 4122 UUID variant could be left up to the implementation.
>
> -Stephen
>
>
> [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2012/WD-sparql11-query-20120105/
> [2] http://www.w3.org/TR/2012/WD-sparql11-update-20120105/
> [3] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4122
> [4] iri(concat("urn:uuid:", uuid())
> [5] http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/miscellaneous-functions.html#function_uuid
> [6] http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.4/static/uuid-ossp.html
>
>

Received on Wednesday, 2 May 2012 09:59:08 UTC