Re: Innovation, community and queries

At 02:15 PM 5/23/02 +0200, Jeen Broekstra wrote:
>A possible benefit I see of standardizing on an RDF QL would be
>to harness efforts made in several groups to optimize tools for
>"their own" QL into a single framework. This makes it much
>easier for such groups to compare results and benefit from each
>other.

I'm not sure that that calls for "standardizing" -- I'd have thought a 
small interest group might be formed to thrash out and document some common 
ideas without doing the full standardization thing.  E.g. like DanBri and 
freinds' RDFWeb/foaf project, or Libby etal's calendar work.

Such a document might even be a "highest point of departure" for subsequent 
standardization if it is found to work well.

This seems to be consistent with what you say below.

>There are several good proposals for QLs out there, and I think
>that creating a "working draft QL" hybrid of a couple of these
>would be a seriously good idea. In fact, we have some plans of
>our own to try this, but we haven't pursued this further sofar,
>because we do not think it is a good idea to propose Yet Another
>RDF QL[tm] on our own.


> > 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'm not aiming for higher-level semantics.  See my response to Andy for a 
little more info.  Also, there's some description at 
http://www.ninebynine.org/RDFNotes/RDFForLittleLanguages.htm, and Python 
software at http://www.ninebynine.org/Software/N3ReportGenerator.zip.

> > I'd like to see more work on storage formats before we
> > nail down a query language.
>
>As I said, I think they are seperate issues. I'm hammering this
>because the system I work on (Sesame) operates on the premise
>that storage and retrieval are completely abstract operations.
>The query interpreter does not have knowledge of the storage
>format, nor is the storage format dependent on the QL we use.

Ideally, yes.  I guess it depends on the goals of your query language.  I 
was casting for something that would map directly onto efficient RDF search 
patterns, without extensive query planning.

#g


-------------------
Graham Klyne
<GK@NineByNine.org>

Received on Thursday, 23 May 2002 12:40:18 UTC