Re: ISSUE-54: Do we need (descriptions of) property functions in SD? Is this in scope for us?

On 2/16/2010 11:15 PM, Gregory Williams wrote:
> On Feb 16, 2010, at 12:28 PM, Steve Harris wrote:
>
>> On 16 Feb 2010, at 17:23, Lee Feigenbaum wrote:
>>
>>> I'd be surprised if anyone disagrees that this is useful.
>>>
>>> However, I have no idea how we would specify it in the service description document. How would we define a property/class that describes something that is not itself defined anywhere? The only way I see to do it is to define what a property function is, and that's beyond our scope.
>>
>> Right, this is my feeling too.
>
> Can I take this to mean that my suggested wording isn't acceptable? I'm not sure we need to define exactly what happens when a property function does its thing so long as we indicate that it's up to the implementation, but others may think differently.

(Greg reminded me where the suggested text was.) The suggested text was:

"""
"Claimed support for a property function indicates that the 
implementation may make use of custom code in matching any triple 
pattern that uses the property in the predicate position. The specific 
mechanism used to perform this matching is undefined."
"""

I don't think I'd be too happy with this. It's (intentionally) a pretty 
vague definition, but I don't see how a vague (non-)definition helps 
anyone. As a W3C Rec, either we're producing something that people can 
use unambiguously, or we should leave it out. I don't think it benefits 
anyone to do what seems to me to amount to a "wink wink nudge nudge you 
know what we're talking about" thing, which this feels like to me.

As Steve said, one of the points of service description is to allow the 
community to coalesce around extension descriptions beyond what we 
standardize. I think the ESW Wiki or the new W3C Semantic Web wiki would 
be good places to coalesce around how to describe property function 
support (and then to include specific property function URIs, as Paul 
asks for).

Lee

Received on Wednesday, 17 February 2010 13:49:22 UTC