Data Access Working Group User Stories Document: A Draft Outline

25 March 2004
Kendall Grant Clark

Introduction

A story or story fragment...

XXX: Some bits about the scope and goals of the WG, mostly light rewrites of bits of the charter.

Motivation

The W3C's Data Access Working Group is working on a recommendation for a query language and data access protocol for the Semantic Web. With completed, widely implemented recommendations in these areas, we think that Semantic Web technology development and adoption rates will be significantly improved. A standard RDF query language would coalesce the technology intended for querying RDF data in much the same way that SQL did for RDBMS data. A standard way to access remote RDF storage servers would do for the Semantic Web and data interoperability what HTTP did for the Web itself.

Problem Description

Query

Because there are no formal standards in these areas, developers in industry and in open source projects have created a wide variety of query languages for RDF data, many of which are listed in <Section Foo>. These languages lack both a common syntax and a common semantics; there is, in fact, a wide variety of semantics: from declartive, SQL-like languages, to path languages, to rule or production-like systems. The existing languages also exhibit a range of extensibility features and builtin capabilities, including inferencing, distributed query, and domain-specific semantics.

Access

As for data access, there are as many different methods of accessing remote RDF storage servers as there are distinct RDF storage server projects. Even where the basic access protocol is common -- HTTP, SOAP, or XML-RPC -- there is little basis upon which generic client support to access a wide variety of such servers might be developed.