RE: thoughts and some refs about AFS-2 UC (simplicity, minimalism )

I'm very skeptical of the "two document" approach to a single RDF query
spec. It strikes me as an artifical link between two independent issues.
If we want to address both problems, let's let them stand independently
and vote up or down on them independently.

Analyzing a known collection of RDF triples is one problem. It's a core
technology that is needed to work with RDF: one can imagine users
querying local files or even use of the language purely programmatically
for internal data which fits the RDF model. The scope ranges from
DOM/SAX to XPath to XQuery for XML.

The architecture of the semantic web strikes me as *totally* different.
Even if we did come up with a recommendation which addresses how to
locate certain resources and the network protocol used to interface with
a remote query processor, implementing that would require an an ability
to analyze the local RDF data.

What's more, heading down the architecture road strikes me as going way
beyond the W3C's role here. The body's core competency is defining
document formats, not architecture. If one were able to express a query
in text form and get a text result, then I think all the other standards
take over from there; it's pretty hard to screw that up in SOAP. Where
certain files should be stored, on which machines query services should
be run, and who is allowed to access those services are precisely those
issues that can't be standardized top-down. Different groups with
different priorities and different approaches are going to try a lot of
different architectures, and some will work better than others. We have
nothing even close to the number of users needed to standardize on any
particular architecture, and what users RDF has now are an extremely
poor representation of the community we're hoping will emerge.

The community needs a sane schema for ins and outs before any
significant applications can be built. Let's address that.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Kendall Clark [mailto:kendall@monkeyfist.com] 
> Sent: 22 March 2004 05:51
> To: public-rdf-dawg@w3.org
> Subject: Re: thoughts and some refs about AFS-2 UC 
> (simplicity, minimalism )
> 
> 
> 
> On Mon, Mar 22, 2004 at 02:20:25PM +0200, Patrick Stickler wrote:
> > I think the DAWG rec could (perhaps should) in fact be two distinct
> > documents, the first covering the expression of queries and query 
> > results
> > in RDF (i.e. the vocabulary and semantics), and the second covering
> > protocol issues for clients submitting such queries to 
> knowledge stores.
> > 
> > We could even choose to have distinct "task forces" within the WG
> > focusing specifically on each.
> 
> FWIW, I argued as much with some folks in Cannes. I think the query
> and protocol parts of our task are entirely orthogonal (though there
> is the one bit, in the protocol phase, of figuring out how to
> represent query types...), and thus could be handled as separate DAWG
> documents. (I know this is insanely early, but Query, Protocol, and
> one or two Primers shapes up nicely as DAWG deliverables -- but, hey,
> Dan, don't shoot me for talking about this too soon! :>)
> 
> I took this position originally because I feared the query bit of our
> work would turn into a death march. While I'm less skeptical about
> that now, it still seems a smart choice to make, if necessary, to
> separate the two issues as cleanly as possible.
> 
> (Also, fwiw, I could do without provenance in the first version,
> though I'd like to have a predicate in our capabilities vocabulary to
> make assertions about provenance.)
> 
> Kendall Clark
> -- 
> Sometimes it's appropriate, even patriotic, to be ashamed
> of your country. -- James Howard Kunstler
> 
>

Received on Monday, 22 March 2004 14:00:45 UTC