Query by Reference

Les chiens,

A very early version of the protocol spec included the ability to do  
"query by reference"; that is, it contained a URI parameter which,  
when dereferenced, returned a representation of a SPARQL query  
resource, and it was that query which the service exected against the  
RDF dataset.

Leigh Dodds suggested that SPARQL Protocol for RDF should have this  
feature [1] for three reasons:

1. promotes query sharing, publishing, reuse
2. allows a query to be the directly consumable output of some other  
web service or process
3. provides an alternative to POST for large queries

I believe personally that this is a reasonable request and would be  
very useful. I also don't believe that's it especially difficult to  
specify or implement (every policy or implementation issue that we've  
already swallowed with regard to RDF datasets applies to query by  
reference, so in that sense it's not really new).

That having been said, I would not object if we decided to raise and  
then postpone this issue for lack of time.

Cheers,
Kendall

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-dawg-comments/ 
2005Nov/0001

Cheers,
Kendall

Received on Wednesday, 4 January 2006 20:20:53 UTC