Raw

The other day I suggested Lucky SPARQL (now SPLUCKY, thanks Kingsley), a little convention in which a SPARQL query with an additional parameter, if it's results were a single URI, would redirect to that URI. One detail I'd overlooked is that it would also be desirable to specify the Accept: type passed to the ultimate URI, but that could be given easily enough in the query parameters.

Anyhow, insomnia just brought this thing back to mind, and it occured to me that this form of queries -

http://example.org/sparql?query=SELECT+DISTINCT+... &action=redirect

- could also appear as resources in the dataset being queried and hence appear as the result of a SPLUCKY query. So one SPLUCKY query could pull out another, which would do the auto-GET thing for another and so on, hopping from URI to URI. Rather like a finite state machine.

Ok, observant readers may have noticed that this is just a glorified redirect chain/loop, not quite an FSM. But it's not far off! [said with the enthusiasm of someone who's successfully built a nearly perpetual motion machine]. In fact the shape of it (combined with insomnia) brought to mind the Turing Machine. But as you need to write to the tape, and idempotent GETs won't allow that, implementing that with SPLUCKY seems a non-starter. Although it did occur to me that if you flip it over, the URI itself could correspond to the tape, that can be modified. Whatever, these kind of machines are very similar to the way R/W Web activity happens, the similarity being more evident when shuffling resources/statements as with SPARQL 1.1. (A nice insomniscient thought is that the Web is just a fancy Turing Machine tape, and humans are the rules tables...).

Incidentally, although SPARQL has a media type "application/sparql", I couldn't see any ref in the specs to using the URI of a query in place of the query itself in the query parameters (!), i.e. something like:

endpoint/query?queryURI=http://example.org/abc.rq

Thought I'd seen that set up on an endpoint somewhere, is it specified anywhere?

Comments to G+ please