Re: test cases for fromUnionQuery, please

On Tue, May 31, 2005 at 12:07:46PM -0500, Dan Connolly wrote:

Re: (3)

> Other things that become illegal in this design are answers
> that come from beyond the graphs given in the query. I doubt
> that can be expressed in our current test harness, but I suppose
> we could figure out some way to do it.

I'd like to clarify (well: change) my straw poll response re: (3): I believe
my org would object formally to it.

Here's why: it makes it impossible (or: very hard) to satisfy one broad set
of use cases (speaking loosely) for SPARQL, namely, to publish a set of
graphs describing some particular view of the world. Suppose that I'm a
small web publisher, and I want to allow RDF queries over my article
metadata, but I only want to answer queries against RDF datasets which
include some set of triples that reflect some claims I want to make.

So, for example, let's say I'm a publisher, and I always want these triples
to be in any RDF dataset for which I'm willing to answer a query:

tag:hackingcongress.info,2004-10-05:/U.S.+Presidency/Bush,George+W,
         rdf:type, http://www.icc-cpi.int/RDF/#war-criminal.

tag:monkeyfist.com,2005-05-31:/US-War-on-Iraq, 
         rdf:type, http://www.icj-cij.org/RDF/#illegal-aggression

Yoshio's design has the implication that SPARQL is only *really* useful for
"pure" query answering services; that is, a compliant SPARQL service can
only answer queries against RDF datasets that are wholly specified by the
agent asking the query. That's certainly one use of SPARQL, and one I might
be interested in, say, as an entrepreneur.

But as a publisher, with a point of view, I don't believe that it works for
me, because I cannot supplement or include in an RDF dataset any arbitrary
triples I'd like to include.

Best,
Kendall Clark

Received on Tuesday, 31 May 2005 17:30:31 UTC