Snow, SPARQL, and SoemthingElseThatBeginsWithS
by Bijan Parsia
Yay! Hurray! My first snow as a resident of the UK!
(Though not my first snow in the UK.)
Today we had hail, rain, bright sun, and crazy snow….very nifty. And last week we had the “oh wow” winds. As in, “Oh wow, I have to downshift in order to turn the pedals on my bicycle.” Now, it is, of course, a testimony to my wimpdom that I could be stopped dead by a little, ok, a lot, of very fast wind. But still!
On the SPARQL front, I am participating in Yet Another SPARQL Tutorial, but this time it’s a full day and seems rather sensible. Hosted by ESWC 2007, and co-presented with a slew of good folks (Axel Polleres organized it, though some of the other folks were putting together submissions as well). I think it’ll be nice with lots of interesting information.
Coincidentally, Axel has put together a worked out SPARQL Rules proposal. This isn’t too shocking, especially given the presence of CONSTRUCT, but it’s very nice to have it worked out. Folk wisdom is ok, but details drive the devil away. It’s an interesting thing to experiment with.
My bit will be, as one might expect, SPARQL over more expressive entailment regimes (through OWL), plus, I hope, a bit about different ways of interpreting results.
On a slightly related note, Michael Kay discovers some value in XQueryX (the XML syntax for XQuery), albeit with the amusing twist that he finds manipulating XQueryX to be the proper domain of XSLT.
Kendall and I went a good chunk of the way to a SPARQLX (i.e., SPARQL XML format). Perhaps it’s time to revive it. The advantages seem to be the same: XSLT transformations to various legacy formats, the ability to indicate in advance (by a schema) what query feature you do or don’t accept (and thus better WSDL typing), better embedding in other XML formats, etc.