Re: boolean shorthand for common optional/union patterns

Hi Danny,

You may be interested in the property paths feature which is in the 
SPARQL 1.1 Query drafts. Please take a look at:

http://www.w3.org/TR/sparql11-query/#propertypaths

Lee

On 12/6/2010 11:43 AM, Danny Ayers wrote:
> Seems like it's often desirable to query over synonyms or near
> synonyms, e.g. where resourceA owl:sameAs resourceB, leading to
> something like:
>
> SELECT ... WHERE {
>
>     OPTIONAL { pattern(<resourceA>) }
>     OPTIONAL { pattern(<resourceB>) }
>
> }
>
> - where each pattern block is the same except for the different resource(s).
>
> So (with apologies if I've overlooked a really obvious alternative)
> why not sugar this up a bit and shorten it to something like:
>
> SELECT ... WHERE {
>
>     pattern(<resourceA>  ||<resourceB>)
>
> }
>
> Ok, a proper example -
>
> SELECT ?label
> WHERE  {
>     ?x (rdfs:label || dc:title)  ?label .
> }
>
> would produce exactly the same results as:
>
> SELECT ?label
> WHERE  {
>     OPTIONAL { ?x rdfs:label  ?label }
>     OPTIONAL { ?x  dc:title  ?label }
> }
>
> This example only saves a few characters, but with richer queries it
> may not only reduce the typing but also make them easier to read&
> maintain.
>
> I've included (braces) above, but it looks pretty unambiguous and I
> suspect wouldn't add much to a parser's complexity with or without
> braces - it's a kinda macro, as the song goes.
>
> I've not had chance to play with this, but at first glance at least it
> seems like the&&  and ! operators could be used in a similar fashion
> (abbreviating unions and a certain shape of filter, I think...).
>
> Cheers,
> Danny.
>
>

Received on Monday, 6 December 2010 18:13:40 UTC