Re: punctuationSyntax

On Fri, 8 Apr 2005 06:35:53 -0400, Eric Prud'hommeaux <eric@w3.org> wrote:

> On Fri, Apr 08, 2005 at 12:20:59PM +0200, Jeen Broekstra wrote:
> > 
> > Dave Beckett wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > >As a particular criticism, I don't like the << ... >> reification
> > >syntax, it has never been asked for as an addition to Turtle (a few
> > >years experience)  and I don't need it for any of my applications.
> > 
> > Actually we have had some examples of people using the reification
> > shorthand syntax in SeRQL. Example case (actually a pretty exotic one
> > where this is used in the CONSTRUCT to create new reifications):
> > 
> > http://www.openrdf.org/forum/mvnforum/viewthread?lastpage=yes&thread=404
> > 
> > From a point of view of QL adequacy it seems a bit poor to not add
> > some sort of convenience shortcut for reification. After all, the
> > concept is part of the RDF abstract model.
> > 
> > That being said, I'm not particularly fond of the double angle bracket
> > syntax either - yet more brackets to clutter up the syntax. So,
> > neither a strong like nor strong dislike in my case, but I felt the
> > additional data point might be useful.
> 
> There's a large camp that feels that RDF reification is broken [BR].
> By providing a syntax to address reification, we'd be marrying a
> particulra form. I would really like to avoid this controversy by
> not addressing reification at all in this version of the QL.

For most any feature we could possibly have in sparql there's probably
somebody out there wanting it but we aren't adding all small number of
users features, we're thinking wider than that.  Even so, syntax for
reification is nowhere near one the top 10 things people most ask for
in a query language beyond rdql as I see it.

I'm not likely to add this form of syntax to turtle either, at least not
without a lot of coordination with cwm/n3 to see if it flies and testing.

If I recall it correctly, the RDF Core WG was very close to killing
reification as it did for rdf:bagID and rdf:aboutEachPrefix as things
that were bad ideas and/or barely used.  These two were used very
little, but reification was used a little more. In my opinion using
reification is not Best Practice, but that's for another WG :)

Dave

Received on Friday, 8 April 2005 11:23:14 UTC