Requirement: protocol independence

The query language must be defined independently of any protocols with
which it is used. Notably, it must not enforce the use of a particular
network protocol in order to answer queries.

I recognize that this proposed requirement is on the periphery of a
rather contentious issue that we have wisely chosen to avoid for the
time being (the network protocol aspect of the charter), but I think
it's quite an important decision to make.

I see the primary use case model dictating this requirement being a
system that simply has a local RDF repository, either on disk or in
memory. It should be possible to write an application which accepts
queries in the language we define (i.e. using a text field in a GUI or a
text file as input to a command-line tool) and produces results in an
implementation-defined manner which may have absolutely nothing to do
with accessing a network--it can simply analyze its own local RDF store.

Such architectures might also allow our query language to function as an
(admittedly potentially heavyweight) analog of XPath for XML: a way of
retrieving particular bits of RDF from local stores, making RDF a
suitable choice for configuration settings and the like.

Such a requirement certainly doesn't dictate that network protocols
can't influence language design; only that one must be able to implement
the language in environment which include absolutely no networking
support of any kind.

Received on Tuesday, 6 April 2004 15:18:31 UTC