Use case: Common access

== Task

A support engineer wants to find the telephone number of a person called
"Fred Bloggs", a person he has not spoken to before but one of his workgroup
colleagues has.  The information may be one of several databases
(information may be quite new, a workgroup may have different databases for
different support situations for historical reasons).

The support engineer has a phone number look facility on his PDA.  This
software knows the query needed based on FOAF but needs to be told where to
ask the query.

== Importance of DAWG

In order to ask the same query of different databases, the software tool
needs to know what protocol to use.  The DAWG recommendation provides a
common way of doing this so the software tool does not need to do anything
different except change the destination of the query.

End-users benefit in seamless access to a wider variety of data sources.
Application providers benefit from wider access to different kinds of data
sources without needing to provide specific software; similarly for server
software providers.

== Other

This is a common access protocol use case.  By having one common protocol,
the same client-side software can be used with different datasources even if
the software was written independently of the database interface.  It does
not matter which implementation of a web-based interface is used.

The protocol should use already deployed technology (SOAP and/or HTTP) to
reduce the deployment burden.  The DAWG rec. need only describe how to
package the query and the details of the result.

The ability to execute queries from a small device suggests a lightweight
usage of HTTP or SOAP, or at least a lightweight subset.

It is possible that the DAWG-QL will not cover all possible situations.  The
protocol could be used to carry other queries, in specialised query
languages, in the same general framework.