RE: Proposed XQuery requirement and/or objective

At 14:47 -0700 7/15/04, Jeff Pollock wrote:
Jim-

Points taken, and no hostility inferred.

Your counterpoints regarding the adoption of SQL are a great debate to have.

In broad brush-strokes, we are committed to a query concrete syntax 
which is grounded in a widely-adopted (and preferably W3C 
recommended) representation.

Further, in no means do I intend to imply that XQuery would make 
things easier on the vendor implementations for RDFS/OWL/Rule 
components of the SemWeb - quite the opposite, the implementations 
may even be more difficult.  Our point is intended to speak towards 
our opinion that a known query representation would speed user 
adoption rates for semantic web languages.

If early adopters of large commercial organizations were faced with 
learning and implementing a wholly new syntax for queries - on top of 
what they already have to pay for in human resource expertise - we 
suspect, and have encountered, resistance.

Anecdotally, we would likely be supportive of the OWL "two surface 
realizations" model, as long as one of them was a widely-adopted 
standard format.

-Jeff-


sounds like we're near the same page -- guess what I'm having trouble 
w/is the "widely-adopted standard format" -- since I haven't seen the 
Xquery proposal, I've been assuming it is some sort of specialization 
of Xquery much as RDQL is a "SQL-like" langauge -- guess I'm thinking 
that most large commercial orgs have lots of people who speak SQL and 
could learn RDQL-like langauge without thinking of it as different (I 
speak from experience, I've met a lot of govt folks who have used 
RDQL with RDF DBs because "they didn't need any training" - which is 
more or less a direct  quote from someone telling me why he didn't 
take a SemWeb training course some colleagues were teaching) where 
Xquery is not yet on their todo list.  On the other hand, it is clear 
more people will move to Xquery as XML DBs slowly get accepted and 
steal market share from traditional RDBMS DBs (although right now it 
is pretty clear which one if David and which is Goliath) .. so I 
think I would agree with you that "as long as one of them was a 
widely-adopted standard format", although I'm less sure we would 
agree which is which :->
  -JH



-- 
Professor James Hendler			  http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler 
Director, Semantic Web and Agent Technologies	  301-405-2696
Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab.	  301-405-6707 (Fax)
Univ of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742	  240-277-3388 (Cell)