RE: why query languages and RDF data have syntaxes?

At 09:30 AM 11/29/02 +0000, Seaborne, Andy wrote:
>I think the query languages you have looked at are trying to address the
>problem of getting information out of an RDF model.  They appeal to the
>common SQL paradigm and provide a programming structure that application
>writers are familiar with.  In particular, the result of a query is a set of
>variable bindings, not a gragh (or set of graphs).  Having such a syntax for
>a query is convenient - building queries as an RDF model in a toolkit of
>your choice is a bit tedious.

Yes, building queries as an RDF model can be tedious, though I do think it 
has some advantages.  That is what I do in my toy query language [1].  I 
find it convenient that there is only one input syntax that my software has 
to deal with, but you're right that the queries can be a bit tedious to 
code.  (I've thought about writing a separate query-to-RDF/N3 compiler ;-)

I entirely agree about the variable binding issue, which is another reason 
that it's not always sufficient to use an RDF example directly as a query.

#g
--

[1] http://www.ninebynine.org/RDFNotes/RDFForLittleLanguages.htm




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

Received on Friday, 29 November 2002 07:51:43 UTC