RDFdb-ists,

What do you think about allowing namespace abbreviations within the
query syntax? At ILRT we've been using this sort of thing:

SELECT ?sal, ?t
FROM http://ilrt.org/discovery/2000/11/rss-query/jobs-rss.rdf,
http://ilrt.org/discovery/2000/11/rss-query/jobs.rss
WHERE
(job::advertises ?x ?y)
(job::salary ?y ?sal)
(job::title ?y ?t)
AND ?sal > 55000
USING job for http://ilrt.org/discovery/2000/11/rss-query/jobvocab.rdf#


or...

SELECT ?signer, ?signerMail, ?signee, ?signeeMail
FROM http://rdfweb.org/~pldab/rdfweb/danbri.wot.rdf
WHERE
(wot::identity ?pk ?id)
(foaf::name ?id ?signee)
(foaf::mbox ?id ?signeeMail)
(wot::signed ?id ?e)
(foaf::name ?e ?signer)
(foaf::mbox ?e ?signerMail)
USING wot FOR http://xmlns.com/wot/0.1/
foaf FOR http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/


...and it seems to be reasonably readable. Probably would also be nice
to allow 'USING default namespace http://etc' in the namespace clause
too.

I'm proposing '::' rather than ':' since this a single ':' can legally
appear in a URI, making it hard to tell when a namespace expansion is
intended (eg. news: is a URI scheme, but news:: is a namespace name).

How does this sound?

Dan