- From: Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org>
- Date: Fri, 01 Jun 2007 12:36:22 +0100
- To: Bijan Parsia <bparsia@cs.man.ac.uk>
- CC: public-semweb-lifesci hcls <public-semweb-lifesci@w3.org>
Bijan Parsia wrote:
>
> Looking at some of the queries in:
> http://esw.w3.org/topic/HCLS/Banff2007Demo?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=Banff2007Part2.pdf
>
>
> I am reminded again of the practice of using gensyms for the URIs of
> terms, e.g.,:
> ?class rdfs:subClassOf go:GO_0008150
>
> In Swoop, we added the ability for the display (e.g., class tree,
> definitions) to replace URIs with the label of your (language) choice.
> I'm sure other tools do that as well. Obviously, a query creation tool
> could do this as well.
>
> I was wondering if it would be worth adding some syntactic sugar to
> sparql to support this style.
Perhaps I misunderstand the issue, but I wonder whether a block of
additional PREFIX declarations would be enough in some cases.
Eg. testing in http://xmlarmyknife.org/api/rdf/sparql/query (ARQ-based),
I can write the usual:
PREFIX foaf: <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/>
SELECT * WHERE {?x a foaf:Document }
...or I can use PREFIX to create direct abbreviations for classes and
properties, in this case abbreviating the verbose and forgettable word
"Document" to the more user-friendly "Doc":
PREFIX foaf: <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/>
PREFIX Doc: <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/Document>
SELECT * WHERE {?x a Doc: }
This would only be useful where a limited number of such declarations
were needed. And they'd still clutter the query, but would at least be
isolated to a set of skimmable declarations at the top of the query,
rather than in the intellectually more demanding WHERE clause.
cheers,
Dan
Received on Friday, 1 June 2007 11:56:10 UTC