[SCL] RDF in an SCL world

[John F. Sowa]

Bill,

I was not recommending the data manipulation stuff,
which is procedural.  But the WHERE clause is just
ordinary FOL, albeit in a rather clumsy notation.

As I said in an earlier note, Stonebreaker's
QUEL was far superior to SQL (and much closer to
predicate calculus notation).  However, QUEL and
the WHERE clause of SQL are logically equivalent
as declarative languages.

I would have no quarrel with anyone proposing a
better notation than SQL for stating constraints.
But I do criticize any proposal (such as OWL)
that fails to provide at least the commonly used
core functionality of the SQL WHERE clause.

You don't need a PhD in comp. sci. to recognize
that any new constraint language must be upward
compatible with the most widely used constraint
language on planet earth.  Unfortunately, a PhD
in comp. sci. tends to make some people blind
to the obvious.

John