RE: RDF Query -- possible WG charter draft for discussion

In the draft charter, there is an architectural point which I'd like to
support.  The emphasis on the pattern matching aspect of query is very
significant because such a pattern matching building block can be used to
have single subgraph match, bound variable results and should also fit with
rule antecedents.   I hope that the requirements phase would have
significant input from the rules community in terms of expressiveness and
the (query) processing model to ensure shared concepts and syntax.
 
The discussion on XPath mixes the idea of the XPath component in the overall
architecture and the specific syntax of XPath as a query language. The
abstract part is a good architectural building block.  The WG should use the
requirements to justify any syntactic similarities as there may be little to
gain in shared tools at this level if the input is an RDF graph and the
output is an graph RDF.


The need I see is a common access mechanism for access to RDF graphs (large
and small) where information consumer and information producer are in
different organisations across the web so likely to be using different
toolkits.  Establishing a basic common language is an important role for a
recommendation from W3C.

Therefore, I'd like to see the WG chartered to produce a "remote access
language" (to change the name) and protocol should not be out of scope, nor
should concrete syntax.  This may limit the range of the full query as an
access language needs to be generally useful, not a complete local query
processing environment - the requirements phase should test this.  The
concrete syntax(es) - for HTTP and XMLP - need not be very human-readable.

	Andy

Received on Tuesday, 11 November 2003 11:53:17 UTC