Bijan Parsia wrote:
Looking at some of the queries in:
http://esw.w3.org/topic/HCLS/Banff2007Demo?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=Banff2007Part2.pdf
I am reminded again of the practice of using gensyms for the URIs of
terms, e.g.,:
?class rdfs:subClassOf go:GO_0008150
In Swoop, we added the ability for the display (e.g., class tree,
definitions) to replace URIs with the label of your (language) choice.
I'm sure other tools do that as well. Obviously, a query creation tool
could do this as well.
I was wondering if it would be worth adding some syntactic sugar to
sparql to support this style.
Perhaps I misunderstand the issue, but I wonder whether a block of
additional PREFIX declarations would be enough in some cases.
Eg. testing in http://xmlarmyknife.org/api/rdf/sparql/query (ARQ-based),
I can write the usual:
PREFIX foaf: <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/>
SELECT * WHERE {?x a foaf:Document }
...or I can use PREFIX to create direct abbreviations for classes and
properties, in this case abbreviating the verbose and forgettable word
"Document" to the more user-friendly "Doc":
PREFIX foaf: <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/>
PREFIX Doc: <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/Document>
SELECT * WHERE {?x a Doc: }
This would only be useful where a limited number of such declarations
were needed. And they'd still clutter the query, but would at least be
isolated to a set of skimmable declarations at the top of the query,
rather than in the intellectually more demanding WHERE clause.
cheers,
Dan
