- From: Steve Harris <S.W.Harris@ecs.soton.ac.uk>
- Date: Tue, 22 Mar 2005 11:58:55 +0000
- To: RDF Data Access Working Group <public-rdf-dawg@w3.org>
On Tue, Mar 22, 2005 at 06:27:21AM -0500, Thompson, Bryan B. wrote: > Steve, > > Don't you think that we will need to have a formal semantics in order to > achieve interoperability? Test cases at the inputs and outputs level can > go some distance toward identifying problems, but there are always the > possible misunderstandings and edge conditions that are not covered by the > test cases, are not part of any conformance suite, and will be the source > of interoperability failure. Without a formal semantics for SPARQL, how > can we hope to have vendor interoperability? I think we can have (adequate) interoperability without complete format semantics, as long as the behaviour is still well defined in important areas, though clearly formal semantics are helpful. We have formal semantics for at least some of the specification, as far as I understand it. The existance of formal semantics is not the be all and end all of interoperability, as implementors still have to translate the semantics into working code, which can be difficult. Just to be clear, I've never wanted interoperability to the extent that two stores when confronted wit hthe same query will return the same results, but the differences between the results should probably be understood (eg. multi-graph storage model, inference capabilities etc.). - Steve
Received on Tuesday, 22 March 2005 11:58:58 UTC