Re: Alternative Syntaxes for BGPs

A slight side-issue, but related to this. I presume the alternative
syntax(es) would be valid for the URI-s given in the FROM [NAMED]
clause, too. That could be the place where I could also add,
conceptually, RIF rules to the graph if RIF entailment done at the endpoint.

AFAIK all serialization syntaxes have their own media types, ie,
implementations may give their preferences and get back information on
the serialization syntax used through that...

As I said, this is a side issue...

Ivan

Birte Glimm wrote:
> Hi all,
> this is mainly motivated from entailment regimes, but might be of
> interest to others, so I didn't prefix the subject of the email.
> 
> I would like to suggest alternative syntaxes for BGPs because in
> particular for OWL with Direct Semantics triple syntax can be very
> long and not very intuitive. E.g.,
> SELECT ?p WHERE { ?p a _:x . _:x a owl:restriction . _:x
> owl:onProperty :hasChild . _:x owl:SomeValuesFrom :Male . }
> asks for things that have a male child. In OWL Functional-Style Syntax
> (used throughout the OWL 2 spec) that would be
> SELECT ?p WHERE { ClassAssertion(ObjectSomeValuesFrom(:hasChild :Male) ?p) . }
> That is not much shorter, but probably more intuitive for OWL folks.
> Each such BGP can directly be translated into triples and for
> functional-style syntax, for example, a mapping to triples is part of
> the OWL 2 spec.
> 
> Now there are at least two possibilities. One could allow SPARQL
> queries with BGPs in non-triple syntax (no mandatory support from
> SPARQL systems) and another one is that SPARQL BGPs are always
> triples, but query interfaces could support different BGP syntaxes and
> translate them to triples before issuing the query.
> 
> In any case, how does the group feel about adding a section about
> alternative syntaxes to the entailment regimes document?
> 
> Cheers,
> Birte
> 

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Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead
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