Comments on: Start Your Query Engines http://clownsinmycoffee.net/2006/12/14/what-he-said/ Inanity of the most cogent sort you can find. Fri, 28 Nov 2008 13:04:48 -0700 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 By: Ronald P. Reck http://clownsinmycoffee.net/2006/12/14/what-he-said/comment-page-1/#comment-333 Ronald P. Reck Thu, 04 Jan 2007 20:01:35 +0000 http://clownsinmycoffee.net/2006/12/14/what-he-said/#comment-333 There is a straight-forward reason why we chose to use XQuery rather than SPARQL. SPARQL is currently a W3C "Working Draft" and the abstract for the Dec. 2006 conference was submitted in June 2006 when SPARQL was even less mature than it is now. In contrast, XQuery was a "Candidate Recommendation" when we started and is now a "Proposed Recommendation", likely to become a full Recommendation in January or February. Our contention is that it is far more practical to focus on the more mature technology for a time-limited pilot. One would hope that US taxpayers appreciate when contractors aren't consuming taxpayer dollars on technology that -- by W3C definition -- "is likely to change". (Reference: http://www.w3.org/TR/#About and http://www.w3.org/2005/10/Process-20051014/tr#maturity-levels.) Also, please note that on page 26 of our published paper (*), we specifically mention SPARQL in the context of "Future Work Potentials", assuming it progresses along the W3C Recommendation Track. (*) See http://2006.xmlconference.org/proceedings/57/presentation.pdf http://iama.rrecktek.com/xml2006/XML2006-XQuery-paper-Sall-Reck-ID57.pdf or http://kensall.com/xmlconf/xml2006-Sall-Reck-XQuery-OWL-Factbook-Wikipedia-PG-paper.pdf There is a straight-forward reason why we chose to use XQuery rather than SPARQL. SPARQL is currently a W3C “Working Draft” and the abstract for the Dec. 2006 conference was submitted in June 2006 when SPARQL was even less mature than it is now. In contrast, XQuery was a “Candidate Recommendation” when we started and is now a “Proposed Recommendation”, likely to become a full Recommendation in January or February.

Our contention is that it is far more practical to focus on the more mature technology for a time-limited pilot. One would hope that US taxpayers appreciate when contractors aren’t consuming taxpayer dollars on technology that — by W3C definition — “is likely to change”.

(Reference: http://www.w3.org/TR/#About and http://www.w3.org/2005/10/Process-20051014/tr#maturity-levels.)

Also, please note that on page 26 of our published paper (*), we specifically mention SPARQL in the context of “Future Work Potentials”, assuming it progresses along the W3C Recommendation Track.

(*) See
http://2006.xmlconference.org/proceedings/57/presentation.pdf
http://iama.rrecktek.com/xml2006/XML2006-XQuery-paper-Sall-Reck-ID57.pdf
or
http://kensall.com/xmlconf/xml2006-Sall-Reck-XQuery-OWL-Factbook-Wikipedia-PG-paper.pdf

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