Re: what functions should we include in SPARQL 1.1?

Just to state that (even if we consider RAND() useful, I am not 100% sure whether i like the example.

 SELECT ?s WHERE { ?s a <Foo> } ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 10

Strictly speaking this has precisely the same semantics as 

 SELECT ?s WHERE { ?s a <Foo> } LIMIT 10

i.e. the order is not prescribed if no ORDER BY is given.
I know that *for specific implementations* (probably most) the result of two consecutive calls of the former version may be different, whereas
two consecutive calls of the latter might not, but I don't think that we should - by such example - indicate that this is intended by the spec
and that this is a way which guarantees random results. Opinions?

Axel

On 3 Nov 2010, at 06:25, Steve Harris wrote:

> It's not in XPath (as far as I can tell), but I'd like a RAND() function, it's incredibly useful, e.g.
> 
> SELECT ?s WHERE { ?s a <Foo> } ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 10
> 
> SQL's RAND() returns a floating point number between 0 and 1, which works fine. You can also pass it a constant seed value as an argument, but that always struck me as a bit of a strange way of doing it.
> 
> - Steve
> 
> On 2010-11-02, at 21:16, Lee Feigenbaum wrote:
> 
>> (This email discharges my ACTION-305, http://www.w3.org/2009/sparql/track/actions/305)
>> 
>> Two months ago we all agreed that we want to move forward with the function library work, and we agreed that we need two things:
>> 
>> 1) A set of functions to include
>> 2) URIs for these functions
>> 
>> This email is to begin a discussion #1 above. AndyS already did much of this work on the wiki page, so I'm pretty much transplanting that here for discussion. Please reply with either concurrence, suggestions & reasons for things to remove or suggestions & reasons for additional things to include.
>> 
>> This references functions from http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath-functions/ .
>> 
>> 
>> Numeric functions:
>> 
>>      6.4.1 fn:abs
>>      6.4.2 fn:ceiling
>>      6.4.3 fn:floor
>>      6.4.4 fn:round
>>      6.4.5 fn:round-half-to-even
>> 
>> String functions:
>> 
>>      7.3.2 fn:compare
>>      7.4.1 fn:concat
>>      7.4.3 fn:substring
>>      7.4.4 fn:string-length
>>      7.4.7 fn:upper-case
>>      7.4.8 fn:lower-case
>>      7.4.10 fn:encode-for-uri
>>      7.5.1 fn:contains     (collation form optional)
>>      7.5.2 fn:starts-with
>>      7.5.3 fn:ends-with
>> 
>> DateTime functions:
>> 
>>      10.4.6 op:dateTime-equal
>>      10.4.7 op:dateTime-less-than
>>      10.4.8 op:dateTime-greater-than
>>      10.5.7 fn:year-from-dateTime
>>      10.5.8 fn:month-from-dateTime
>>      10.5.9 fn:day-from-dateTime
>>      10.5.10 fn:hours-from-dateTime
>>      10.5.11 fn:minutes-from-dateTime
>>      10.5.12 fn:seconds-from-dateTime
>>      10.5.13 fn:timezone-from-dateTime
>> 
>> Misc functions:
>> 
>> 	3. fn:error
>> 
>> 
>> Lee
>> 
>> 
>> 
> 
> -- 
> Steve Harris, CTO, Garlik Limited
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Received on Sunday, 7 November 2010 17:56:13 UTC