- From: Danny Ayers <danny666@virgilio.it>
- Date: Sat, 1 Jun 2002 00:57:50 +0200
- To: "Uche Ogbuji" <uche.ogbuji@fourthought.com>
- Cc: "Seaborne, Andy" <Andy_Seaborne@hplb.hpl.hp.com>, "'Patrick Stickler'" <patrick.stickler@nokia.com>, "ext Thomas B. Passin" <tpassin@comcast.net>, "RDF Interest" <www-rdf-interest@w3.org>
>> >properties(@"x:spam") >> >@"x:spam" - properties() -> * >> >> Another good reason for an RDF QL in RDF! > >Possibly. It's hard to judge without seeing your proposal for >expressing it >in RDF instead. Fair response, and no, as you probably guessed, I don't have a proposal at hand. >Of course, I must warn you I'm a sceptic. Me too, which is partly why I have a knee-jerk reaction to new syntaxes. >> Seriously though, I do think such a QL would be extremely >useful, not only >> because it would generally help interop. It would also mean that a whole >> range of common expressions could become easier in RDF (without having to >> drop into DAML-land), > >Examples? Essentially the kind of stuff like that which SQL scores on (almost irrespective of the relational model) - e.g. forall kind of things. >> and also make things like XSLT-ish transformations a >> lot more straightforward. > >We do this in 4Suite by using Versa to query and using XSLT itself >to generate >transformed RDF/XML. Works well, but we plan to come up with an >XUpdate-like >syntax as well. Hmm - I've experimented in the RDF+XSLT area myself, but have serious doubts on its potential - ok, it can probably solve a lot of specific problems, but having to think in trees is a bit ugly for the general case. >I'm not sure how Query in RDF would help make this more palatable >than me. >After all, the analog of RDF query in XSLT, XPath, is not in XML >syntax. It >still works quite well. Very true, but might it just be that with the DOM model doesn't need to be good at metamodelling, which is something I would hope RDF languages would be good at. >> Not unrelated to the interop point, the ability to >> save sets of queries in a common format like RDF/XML has to be a >plus - same >> parser etc etc. > >This is a trivial matter of writing an RDF binding for whatever >data model a >QL uses. Writing a binding is trivial, writing a good binding is another matter. Cheers, Danny.
Received on Friday, 31 May 2002 19:08:36 UTC