Re: Innovation, community and queries

[Jeen Broekstra]

> On Thursday 23 May 2002 01:40, Graham Klyne wrote:
>
> > My own intuition is that a query language for RDF should aim
> > to operate at a higher level than "find this pattern of
> > triples", but in my implementation it was hard to break away
> > from.
>
> I am not quite sure what kind of higher level you have in mind.
> Do you mean something like RDF Schema semantics interpretation,
> or something more along the lines of query formulation in
> natural language?
>

I think that it will become increasingly important to be able to deal with
patterns of statements rather than single statements or single types of
statements.  Think of 5-way joins in a relational database, for example.  Or
a simple case would be to retrieve statements where there is a specific
predicate and the object is also the subject of a statement whose predicate
is a label and whose value is specified.

I think of stereotyped structures of statements like these as idioms.  There
will be a great many idioms, and applications may well be specialized for
specific ones.  A reified statement could be considered a kind of simple
idiom.

A query language will be needed that can effectively work with idioms.
Simple idioms, with little depth, can be handled already by some query
langaguages (I think, but haven't tried any of them), but I think more
support for stereotyped structures will be necessary.

I don't know if this is what Graham was thinking about.  Graham, what say
you?

Cheers,

Tom P

Received on Thursday, 23 May 2002 09:03:26 UTC