Re: comments on Section 1 and Section 2 of SPARQL Query Language for RDF [OK?] [needstest]

From: Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org>
Subject: Re: comments on Section 1 and Section 2 of SPARQL Query Language for RDF [OK?] [needstest]
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 11:46:42 -0600

> On Wed, 2006-02-22 at 18:56 -0500, Peter F. Patel-Schneider wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > Comments on Section 1 and Section 2 of
> > 
> > 	SPARQL Query Language for RDF
> > 	W3C Working Draft 20 February 2006
> > 	http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-rdf-sparql-query-20060220/
> > 
> > 
> > These are personal comments, from me, an interested expert.  They may not
> > reflect the views of any institution to which I am associated.
> 
> Thank you very much for your detailed review...
> 
> 
> > In general I found the first two sections of the document *very* hard to
> > understand.  The mixing of definitions, explanation, information, etc. confused
> > me over and over again.  I strongly suggest an organization something like:
> > 
> >   Introduction (informative)
> >   Formal development (normative)
> >     Underlying notions (normative)
> >     Patterns and matching (normative)
> >   SPARQL syntax (normative)
> >   Informal narrative (informative)
> >   Examples (informative)
> > 
> > I also found that things that didn't need to be explained were explained, and
> > things that did need to be explained were not explained.  A major example of
> > the latter is the role of the scoping graph.  Examples showing why E-matching
> > is defined the way it is would be particularly useful.
> > 
> > 
> > Because of the problems I see in Section 2, I do not feel that I can adequately
> > understand the remainder of the document.  
> > 
> > Because of these problems I do not feel that this document should be advanced
> > to the next stage in the W3C recommendation process without going through
> > another last-call stage.  (This could however be performed by terminating the
> > current last call, quickly fixing the document, and starting another last
> > call.)
> 
> After perhaps overly brief consideration of your comments, we are
> somewhat sympathetic to your concerns about organization and
> clarity; however, we also have schedule considerations
> and the investment in other reviewers. Re-organizing the document
> at this stage would delay things considerably; it's not even clear
> that we could get a sufficient number of reviewers to take another
> look before CR.
> 
> The specific examples you give below are very valuable; I
> am marking this thread [needstest], which allows us to find
> it more easily during CR and integrate the examples you give
> into our test suite. We have also discussed the possibility
> of significant organizational changes after CR, such as
> moving the formal definitions to the back of the document.
> 
> As far as I can tell, all of the examples you give are useful
> clarification questions, but they do not demonstrate design errors.
> If they do, in fact, demonstrate design errors, I'm reasonably
> confident we will discover that as we integrate them into
> our test suite during CR.

My view is that my message points out some deficiencies in the definitions
underlying the design of BGP querying.  I thus do not see how my message can
possibly be characterised as not demonstrating design errors.

> Are you, by chance, satisfied by this response, which does
> not involve making the changes you request at this time,
> but includes an offer to give them due consideration after
> we request CR? If not, there's no need to reply; I'm marking
> this comment down as outstanding dissent unless I hear otherwise.

Yes, that is correct.  I am formally dissenting from advancing to CR at this
time.

Peter F. Patel-Schneider
Bell Labs Research

Received on Wednesday, 22 March 2006 19:02:48 UTC