Editorial comment on SPARQL Query Language Last Call

Comment on http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/WD-rdf-sparql-query-20050419/
Category: Editorial (in fact: readability...)

The section on Blank Nodes in section 2.8 (Other Syntactic Forms) says:


>  [ foaf:name  ?name ;
>     foaf:mbox  <alice@example.org> ]
>
> This is the same as writing the following basic graph pattern for
> some uniquely allocated blank node:
>
> _:b18  foaf:name  ?name .
> _:b18  foaf:mbox  <alice@example.org> .

Which is fine, but nothing is said in the draft what means

 ex:a ex:b [ foaf:name  ?name ;
     foaf:mbox  <alice@example.org> ].

ie, that this triplets is *replaced* by

 ex:a ex:b _:b18 .

where _b:18 is the blank node described above.

[Just saying that [ .... ] is mechanically replaced by those two lines above
would lead to:

 ex:a ex:b _:b18  foaf:name  ?name .
 _:b18  foaf:mbox  <alice@example.org> .

which is syntactically wrong.

The same remark holds for the section on RDF Collections:

 ex:a ex:b (1 ?x 3) .

should be explained that it is replaced by:

 ex:a ex:b _:b0 .

where _:b0 is the blank node described in the section.

Sincerely,

--

Ivan Herman
W3C Communications Team, Head of Offices
C/o W3C Benelux Office at CWI, Kruislaan 413
1098SJ Amsterdam, The Netherlands
tel: +31-20-5924163; mobile: +31-641044153;
URL: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/