- From: Fred Zemke <fred.zemke@oracle.com>
- Date: Mon, 31 Jul 2006 16:22:13 -0700
- To: public-rdf-dawg@w3.org
Andy Seaborne wrote Maybe we could see where we are on the road to CR exit. I am strongly opposed to exiting CR because of the issues I have raised with the specification, which I regard as serious and fatal. In my view the purpose of a specification is to specify. Examples do not constitute a normative specification. The document (both the CR and rq24) fails to specify in the following important ways: 1. There is no bridge from the concrete syntax to the abstract semantics. Consequently the document can not actually be said to specify the language at all, except that A.7 "Grammar" really does specify the syntax. 2. The scope of blank node identifiers has not been stated clearly. The consensus in an email thread appears to be that the scope is a FilteredBasicGraphPattern (rule [21]) but the definitions in 2.5.1 "General framework" do not support this and need to be rewritten. 3. The abstract semantics does not pay attention to the critical issue of the domain of solutions. Consequently the notion of "solution" is not well-defined. 4. The preceding problems are perhaps at their worst in the case of optional graph patterns. The grammar does not indicate what the first operand of a graph pattern is, and there is no discursive text on the subject either. Thus there is no bridge from the syntax to the abstract semantics. As for the abstract semantics, the definition of OPT(A,B) appears to reduce to just solving A with no role for B. 5. It is not clear whether UNION requires an implementation to count duplicate solutions precisely, which I personally advocate, though I could live with the alternative of stating explicitly that it is implementation-defined or -dependent how many duplicates are returned. Fred
Received on Monday, 31 July 2006 23:23:25 UTC