RE: Query use cases

Andy,

I've been thinking some more about this.  I have sympathy with your view, 
and certainly agree that flattening should not be a "normal" mode of 
operation.  But I'm also having problems seeing how to make this part of an 
application wrapper without having the application code know all the 
details of the container structure.

I'm thinking in terms of something like a syntactic marker in the QBE 
template -- distinct from the actual data matched, in the same way that a 
variable name is a distinct element in a query -- that can effectively span 
the list structure.

I think a similar effect could be obtained in the proposed Jena2 framework 
by defining a new graph that is a closure of an input graph under some 
simple inference rules:

     ?l rdf:first    ?m
     ------------------
     ?l query:member ?m

     ?l rdf:rest     ?r
     ?r query:member ?m
     ------------------
     ?l query:member ?m

then query the derived graph for:

     ?l query:member ?m

To do something similar for the original RDF container forms would also 
require some special syntactic recognition of container membership 
properties for rdf:_1, rdf:_2, etc., to yield something like:

     ?l rdf:_<n> ?m
     ------------------
     ?l query:member ?m

(RDFcore has decided to define rdfs:member (or rdfs:contains, I can't 
definitively tell which) as a common superproperty for rdf:_n.)

#g
--

At 05:08 PM 9/16/02 +0100, Seaborne, Andy wrote:

>Graham,
>
>Personally, I don't like the idea of flattening the list in the query
>results as the normal mode of operation - sometimes I do want the list as a
>list, they aren't just a way of encoding a bag for multiple properties,
>sometimes things like the order in the list matters or even the fact it is a
>list at all.  I hoped the query system understood lists and treated them so
>as to return a thing explicitly marked as list, not a plain resource - that
>is just a convenience.
>
>My approach for your example would be to write an application wrapper around
>the query results that did the flattening to make it look like multiple
>properties if the application so desired.  I see it as an application
>modelling decision.
>
> > Is that a request to submit an example?
>
>Yes!
>
>         Andy
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Graham Klyne [mailto:GK@NineByNine.org]
>Sent: 16 September 2002 16:35
>To: Seaborne, Andy
>Cc: Barnell, Alex; 'RDF Rules'
>Subject: RE: Query use cases
>
>
>At 12:57 PM 9/11/02 +0100, Seaborne, Andy wrote:
> >That's an interesting example (daml:collection) - presumably it suggests
>the
> >query should return only the list head and start part way down (unlikely
>the
> >query would do this match but possible).  I didn't notice anything DQL
>about
> >this - maybe I missed it.
>
>My take was that the query would return the contents of the list, not the
>list itself; e.g.
>
>Thus a query against:
>
>     head first item1 ;
>          rest [ first item2 ;
>                 rest [ first item3 ;
>                        rest nil ] ] .
>
>might return matches against:
>
>     item1
>     item2
>     item3
>
> >The same is true of RDF alt/seq/bag - in many application situations it
> >would be nicest to mask the RDF encoding of the compound structure and
> >return a
>
>Quite!
>
>I thought that an implied rdf:member property might be used, so a QBE might
>be:
>
>      head rdf:member ?x .
>
>to return item1, item2, item3 in the above example, or in:
>
>      rdf:Seq rdf:_1 item1 .
>      rdf:Seq rdf:_2 item2 .
>      rdf:Seq rdf:_3 item3 .
>
> >Alex Barnell has been doing some work here on "RDFObjects" which provides
> >applications with a view of the RDF data as structured data items (e.g.
> >action items for working groups, vCards or iCal entries).
> >
> >Is this way of thinking about it - as higher level data abstractions - what
> >is going on, do you think?
>
>Hmmm.... I'm not sure, but maybe yes.  In the sense that I want to treat a
>collection as an abstraction and query over it without being aware of its
>detailed encoding in RDF.
>
>By the way, the actual use case here is for document issue tracking, with
>issue history represented as a daml:collection style of list.  I want to
>form a simple query that will return successive elements of the list in the
>same way that I can currently query a repeated property value (but in the
>collection case, the order in which bindings are returned matches the
>collection order).
>
> >Would submit an example at
> >http://rdfstore.sourceforge.net/2002/06/24/rdf-query/, run by Alberto
> >Reggiori, which is a collection of query examples even if it's a use case
> >with no solution.
>
>Is that a request to submit an example?
>
>#g
>
>
>-------------------
>Graham Klyne
><GK@NineByNine.org>

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

Received on Wednesday, 18 September 2002 08:52:17 UTC