A proposal for an RDF query language

Date:      Mon, 6 Nov 2000 18:54:09 +0200 (EET)
From:      Greg Karvounarakis <gregkar@ics.forth.gr>
To:        www-rdf-interest@w3.org
Subject:   A proposal for an RDF query language

Dear RDF-IG members,

We would like to announce our proposal for an RDF query language, RQL. You can find the PDF version of our paper at:

http://www.ics.forth.gr/proj/isst/RDF/rql.pdf.

A short abstract follows.

We really invite interested readers to send us their comments and/or suggestions.

Best regards
Greg Karvounarakis

Querying Community Web Portals

ABSTRACT

Information systems such as organizational memories, vertical aggregators, infomediaries, etc. are expected to play a central role in the 21st-century economy by enabling the development and maintenance of specific communities of interest (e.g., enterprise, professional, trading) on corporate intranets or the Web. Such Community Web Portals essentially provide the means to select, classify and access, in a semantically meaningful and ubiquitous way various information resources (e.g., sites, documents, data) for diverse target audiences (corporate, inter-enterprise, e-marketplace, etc.).

Yet, in commercial software for deploying Community Portals, querying is still limited to full-text (or attribute-value) retrieval and more advanced information-seeking needs require navigational access. Furthermore, recent Web standards for describing resources (see the W3C Metadata Activity: RDF/ RDF Schema) are completely ignored. Moreover, standard (relational or object) databases are too rigid for capturing the peculiarities of RDF descriptions and schemas.

Motivated by the above issues, we propose a new data model and a query language for RDF descriptions and schemas. Our language, called $RQL$, relies on a formal graph model, that captures the RDF modeling primitives, also providing a richer type system, and permits the interpretation of RDF descriptions by means of one or more schemas. In this context, $RQL$ adapts the functionality of semistructured query languages to the peculiarities of RDF but also extends this functionality in order to query RDF schemas. The novelty of $RQL$ lies in its ability to smoothly switch between schema and data querying while exploiting - in a transparent way - the taxonomies of labels and multiple classification of resources.

Prepared by Robin Cover for The XML Cover Pages archive. See "Resource Description Framework (RDF)."

SEARCH Advanced Search ABOUT Site Map CP RSS Channel Contact Us Sponsoring CP About Our Sponsors NEWS Cover Stories Articles & Papers Press Releases CORE STANDARDS XML SGML Schemas XSL/XSLT/XPath XLink XML Query CSS SVG TECHNOLOGY REPORTS XML Applications General Apps Government Apps Academic Apps EVENTS LIBRARY Introductions FAQs Bibliography Technology and Society Semantics Tech Topics Software Related Standards Historic	A proposal for an RDF query language Date: Mon, 6 Nov 2000 18:54:09 +0200 (EET) From: Greg Karvounarakis <gregkar@ics.forth.gr> To: www-rdf-interest@w3.org Subject: A proposal for an RDF query language Dear RDF-IG members, We would like to announce our proposal for an RDF query language, RQL. You can find the PDF version of our paper at: http://www.ics.forth.gr/proj/isst/RDF/rql.pdf. A short abstract follows. We really invite interested readers to send us their comments and/or suggestions. Best regards Greg Karvounarakis Querying Community Web Portals ABSTRACT Information systems such as organizational memories, vertical aggregators, infomediaries, etc. are expected to play a central role in the 21st-century economy by enabling the development and maintenance of specific communities of interest (e.g., enterprise, professional, trading) on corporate intranets or the Web. Such Community Web Portals essentially provide the means to select, classify and access, in a semantically meaningful and ubiquitous way various information resources (e.g., sites, documents, data) for diverse target audiences (corporate, inter-enterprise, e-marketplace, etc.). Yet, in commercial software for deploying Community Portals, querying is still limited to full-text (or attribute-value) retrieval and more advanced information-seeking needs require navigational access. Furthermore, recent Web standards for describing resources (see the W3C Metadata Activity: RDF/ RDF Schema) are completely ignored. Moreover, standard (relational or object) databases are too rigid for capturing the peculiarities of RDF descriptions and schemas. Motivated by the above issues, we propose a new data model and a query language for RDF descriptions and schemas. Our language, called $RQL$, relies on a formal graph model, that captures the RDF modeling primitives, also providing a richer type system, and permits the interpretation of RDF descriptions by means of one or more schemas. In this context, $RQL$ adapts the functionality of semistructured query languages to the peculiarities of RDF but also extends this functionality in order to query RDF schemas. The novelty of $RQL$ lies in its ability to smoothly switch between schema and data querying while exploiting - in a transparent way - the taxonomies of labels and multiple classification of resources. Prepared by Robin Cover for The XML Cover Pages archive. See "Resource Description Framework (RDF)."