Re: [sub-select] Some examples and discussion

Ivan Mikhailov wrote:
> 
> I'd say even more.
> 
> Optimization and implementation effort must be ignored as decision factor, "must" in its ultimate, RFC 2119 meaning.
> 
> The reason is that language users are much more numerous than language implementations.
> A book composer do not pay much attention to the author's comfort when it conflicts with the comfort of readers.
> A public transport dispatcher would ignore personal wishes from train crew --- the railway is built not for their needs.
> We're in similar circumstances.

I don't think it's worth our time to try to reach consensus on general 
principles governing inclusion and exclusion of principles, which is why 
so far I've just thrown out my own suggestions for criteria to consider 
without explicitly opening debate on the topic :-)

More to the point, our group's charter is not entirely silent on this issue:

"""
Although the community has expressed opinions on various types of 
extensions to SPARQL, this Working Group is only chartered to make 
additions that are expected to be widely used and can be shown to exist 
in multiple, interoperable implementations. It is not the goal of this 
working group to make a significant upgrade of the SPARQL language.
"""

So yes, I think it's definitely fair to say that ease of implementation 
and likelihood of implementation are fair factors to consider--and 
that's why I'm personally keen to focus on those proposed features that 
have existing implementations.

I'm confident that whatever features we end up specifying we're going to 
contribute some important advances to SPARQL and the broader Semantic 
Web community, but I'm even more confident--based on what I've seen 
since January 2008--that whatever 35 (or so) features we *do not* 
specify will not lethally harm the adoption and utility of SPARQL. :-)

Lee

Received on Saturday, 14 March 2009 05:48:05 UTC