Re: SPARQL syntax proposals

Steve Harris wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 03, 2005 at 04:51:13 -0500, Eric Prud'hommeaux wrote:
> 
>>On Tuesday, the DAWG f2f took up syntax issues. We came up with a
>>syntax that was acceptable to all or most (don't know how SteveH would
>>phrase his feelings) of the attendees. These are expressed as examples
> 
> 
> I am much happier with this iteration of the N3-style syntax than the
> previous ones, I feel its close enough to turtle that it wont create more
> confusion than neccesary. Although, I feel that it still has readability
> issues for people not familiar with N3/Turtle, the the .'s ,'s and ;'s
> took me a lot of practice to visually parse.
> 
> ...
> 
>>bNodes are interpreted as unique, unreferencable variables.
>>SELECT ?who WHERE { ?who :brother [ in Army ], :mother [ in Navy] . }
>>(same as            ?who :brother ?b. 
>>                    ?b in Army.
>>                    ?who :mother ?m.
>>                    ?m in Navy              )
> 
> 
> How about _:foo ? It seems like that should be allowed for symmetry,
> letting people use bNode sugar, but not the longhand form would be odd.
> Also, is "in" a typo? Should it be ":in" or something?

+1 to having _:foo as well.  Sometimes, the syntactic sugar can't express a 
graph structure.

[The bNode-in-query label is just for parsing to be able to say "same as that 
one" and is distinct from any bNode in the data target]

	Andy

> 
> It was suggested that the N3 syntax be present in an appendix after the
> decision to use SQISH/RDQL etc. style () syntax, so I hope whichever
> syntax is not used will also be noted in an appendix for the same reasons,
> after the vote on Tuesday.
> 
> Its obvious that whichever way the decision goes its going to annoy and/or
> disenfranchise a lot of people, but I dont think theres anything that can
> be done about that. I was trying to think of ways that you could
> unambiguously use either syntax (not mixed in one query though) in SPARQL
> expressions, but I couldn't come up with anything that seemed
> acceptable. Multiple syntaxes are bad news anyway.
> 
> - Steve
>

Received on Friday, 4 March 2005 12:18:23 UTC