RE: requirement: rdfs query (for lack of a better name...)

I could on at great length about how bad an idea I think this is, but
I'll keep it short.

Adding "just a little bit of inference" to the query language is the
road to disaster. It just doesn't work that way.

What's more, adding support for just one particular flavor of
supplementary semantic knowledge (RDFS) is great way to kill off use of
any other knowledge sources. It's really hard to come up with a query
language for inference if it's not orthogonal to the query language
against its data model.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: public-rdf-dawg-request@w3.org 
> [mailto:public-rdf-dawg-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Kendall Clark
> Sent: 06 May 2004 10:53
> To: public-rdf-dawg@w3.org
> Subject: requirement: rdfs query (for lack of a better name...)
> 
> 
> 
> Requirement
> -----------
> It should be possible to query the RDFS structure of an RDF 
> graph to find,
> for example, the parents and instances of a class or the class tree.
> 
> Discussion
> ----------
> I'm not sure whether this comes down, in the end, to a 
> semantic requirement
> or just a request for sugar for a particular kind of query; 
> but what my
> users need (and we have implemented in a really ugly, API 
> munging way) is
> the ability to ask for all the instances of a class, all the 
> parents of a
> class, and so on. Being able to do these queries, and being 
> able to do them
> "easily" (yes, I know, untestable, but still...) is a real 
> requirement for us.
> 
> The DIG Description Logic Interface ASK language is, more or 
> less, what we'd
> like to have. See <http://dl-web.man.ac.uk/dig/>.
> 
> Best,
> Kendall Clark
> 
>

Received on Thursday, 6 May 2004 15:13:18 UTC