- From: Andy Seaborne <andy.seaborne@talis.com>
- Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2010 10:34:28 +0000
- To: Steve Harris <steve.harris@garlik.com>
- CC: "public-rdf-dawg@w3.org Group" <public-rdf-dawg@w3.org>
It's not been a support issue with the released update language documented in the submission. Style-wise, verb-rich does not worry me. The verbs should have a logical categorization, separating deleting triples and managing graphs say. In one design, theer was "REMOVE" for "DELETE DATA" - that did not receive much enthusiasm. On 11/03/2010 08:29, Steve Harris wrote: > Observation about SPARQL Update syntax: > > SPARQL Update is quite verb-rich, making it (IMHO) harder to learn the > syntax, and it seems to me that one of CLEAR and DELETE is redundant now: > > DELETE GRAPH <a> > DELETE DEFAULT # see previous mail I find that confusing usage - is that CLEAR or DROP? You explain below it's CLEAR but reading it in natural language, I would have gone for a reading of get rid of the GRAPH (i.e. DROP). It is useful to have an explicit "delete everything" operation (rather than say "DELETE WHERE { ?s ?p ?o }" both for simple implementations and also the application writer because it's quite a major thing to do. CLEAR is an abbreviation of the abbreviated syntax (half :-). c.f. SQL TRUNCATE. Identifying the DEFAULT graph seems an interesting thing to do. Andy > DELETE DATA { <s> <p> <o> . } > DELETE WHERE { <s> <p> ?o . } > DELETE { ?o <p> <s> . } WHERE { <s> <p> ?o . } > > The first one is equivalent to > DELETE WHERE { GRAPH <a> { ?s ?p ?o . } } > which is perhaps more evidence that two verbs don't make it clearer. > > We do still need DROP GRAPH, as that does something slightly different. > > - Steve >
Received on Thursday, 11 March 2010 10:35:08 UTC