RE: Functions in N3 (was: Re: What Happened to the Semantic Web?)

* Simon.Cox@csiro.au <Simon.Cox@csiro.au> [2017-12-03 05:00+0000]
> Have a talk to your w3c staff contact. It is usually possible to fix obvious things like this. Particularly if the namespace was already allocated, so the URI set is already implied.

It's easy to fix obvious things. The question we have to ask is if this is indeed obvious and non-contentious.

When W3C convenes a Working Group, the process involves knocking on a lot of doors to get all the relevant parties into the room. The WG tools on some stuff and asks widely and loudly for implementations and review. The product is that the resulting documents have been the subject of a lot of experimentation by the time they're published. Namespace documents don't require as much ceremony, but namespace documents attached to a Rec are making a best-faith effort to codify the terms defined in the Rec.

Typically, ns docs have many terms and include a namespace policy which claims stability after the accompanying specs make it through LC. <http://www.w3.org/ns/sparql> has one exciting term in it and probably even if we totally screw up and change it a hundred times, nothing out there will break. That said, it would be I believe it would be appropriate to contact at least the members of the SPARQL 1.1 WG to settle questions like:

  Do we duplicate names that are already defined in XPath/XML Schema?

  Are SPARQL implementations expected to recognize the newly-minted names? If not, how do we distinguish the ones which do?

  What are our unknown unknowns?

The last one is the hardest and is why we reach out to as many folks as possible.


> ________________________________
> From: Martynas Jusevičius <martynas@atomgraph.com>
> Sent: Saturday, 2 December 2017 12:05:24 AM
> To: Gregory Williams
> Cc: Andreas Harth; Sean B. Palmer; SW-forum Web; public-lod; www-archive; Ivan Herman
> Subject: Re: Functions in N3 (was: Re: What Happened to the Semantic Web?)
> 
> Gregory,
> 
> are you still planning to upload the vocabularies?
> 
> I have a use case for it :) To specify the function to apply in a FILTER. I'd much rather use a function URI than a label literal.
> 
> 
> Martynas
> 
> On Fri, Oct 13, 2017 at 5:30 PM, Gregory Williams <greg@evilfunhouse.com<mailto:greg@evilfunhouse.com>> wrote:
> /cc Ivan Herman
> 
> On Oct 13, 2017, at 8:14 AM, Andreas Harth <andreas@harth.org<mailto:andreas@harth.org>> wrote:
> >
> > The lack of URIs for SPARQL functions has irked me for a while.
> >
> > We have been using N3 as rule syntax in our Linked Data-Fu system,
> > and have found that the CWM builtins [1] are problematic.  Some really
> > useful functions are missing (such as isLiteral(), isURI, datatype()),
> > and some of the existing functions are underspecified concerning the
> > support for datatypes.
> >
> > SPARQL has a much more complete set of functions and it would be nice to
> > be able to use those in N3.  Defining a prefix for the SPARQL builtin
> > functions (and operators) should be easy.  I wonder why nobody has done
> > that already.
> 
> During the SPARQL 1.1 WG, it was always my intention to define IRIs for all the built-in functions. We even set up a namespace for it[1]. Alas, it seems it was never properly populated, as BOUND is the only function with an assigned IRI. Maybe it would still be possible to get those all assigned-I still have local working copies of what I think should be in /ns/sparql.
> 
> Thanks,
> Greg
> 
> [1] https://www.w3.org/ns/sparql
> 

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-ericP

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Received on Sunday, 3 December 2017 06:03:16 UTC