Erotetic Analysis of the SPARQL Query Language
Speaker: Simon Raboczi, ITEE
When: 2006-08-01 15:30:00
Venue: 78-622
Host: Dr Guido Governatori
Abstract:he World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has for the last decade been
developing and promoting a suite of "semantic web" technologies to
enable machine understandable web content. The foundation for this
is the Resource Description Framework (RDF), a data model which
expands the existing web of "internet documents, connected by
hyperlinks" beyond the network and into a web of "anything,
connected by named relationships". The E-R-like graph which results
can be treated as a machine understandable database.
The SPARQL query language is a recent effort intended to serve the
same role for RDF data that SQL does for relational tables.
However, SPARQL is a patchwork of concepts and syntax from SQL, RDF,
and XQuery, inheriting some amount of complexity from each source.
The research being undertaken is to provide a semantic account of
SPARQL in order to identify errors and ambiguities in the current
specification, and to suggest simplications and extensions in future
versions. The little-known discipline of erotetic logic (the logic
of questions and answers) has been found to be useful for this
analysis, and its application to SPARQL will be described.
Biography:(biography unavailable)
Type: MPhil confirmation
Contact:Dr Guido Governatori, seminar host (guido@itee.uq.edu.au)
or Guido Governatori (ITEE seminar co-ordinator)
(guido@itee.uq.edu.au)