SPARQL 1.1 Protocol formats

David,

I stumbled upon what I think is an issue with the protocol document while trying to respond to a comment about service descriptions.

It would be nice if the protocol doc talked about the serialization format for CONSTRUCT/DESCRIBE queries in a bit more detail. The only construct query example in the draft uses Turtle in the response, but there's no text discussing this. Section 2.1.1.2 indicates that RDF/XML and application/sparql-results+xml are the only explicitly supported formats, but other RDF serializations are also acceptable.

Again in section 2.1.1.2, an Out Message is described as optionally being "an equivalent RDF graph serialization" to RDF/XML, but there's no indication whether this ought to align with Accept headers in the HTTP bindings (perhaps this is discussed somewhere that I've overlooked?). I'm left thinking that an implementation could always return RDF in a non-standard, non-RDF/XML format, even if RDF/XML is the only format requested (or if no explicit format is requested), and still be conformant. Have I understood that correctly?

thanks,
.greg

Received on Sunday, 28 February 2010 04:20:24 UTC