+++ /dev/null
-<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
-<html>
-<head>
- <title>MathQL</title>
-
- <meta http-equiv="content-type"
- content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
-
- <meta name="author" content="Ferruccio Guidi">
-
- <meta name="description" content="MathQL Home Page">
-</head>
- <body>
-
-<h1 align="center">MathQL-1</h1>
-
-<h2 align="center">A query language for RDF metadata</h2>
-
-<table cellpadding="10" cellspacing="2" border="0" width="95%"
- bgcolor="#ffffff">
- <tbody>
- <tr>
- <td valign="top" align="left">
-
- <ul>
- <li><a href="index.html">Forward</a><br>
- </li>
-
- </ul>
-
- <ul>
- <li>Features</li>
-
- </ul>
-
- <ul>
- <li><a href="whatsnew.html">What's new</a></li>
-
- </ul>
-
- <ul>
- <li><a href="documentation.html">Documentation</a></li>
-
- </ul>
-
- <ul>
- <li><a href="implementation.html">Implementation</a><br>
- </li>
-
- </ul>
-
- <ul>
- <li><a href="authors.html">The authors</a><br>
- </li>
-
- </ul>
-
- <ul>
- <li><a href="links.html">Links</a><br>
- </li>
-
- </ul>
- <br>
- </td>
- <td valign="top">
- <div align="right"><b>Goals and features</b><br>
- </div>
- <br>
- MathQL-1 is designed to achieve the following goals:<br>
-
- <ol>
- <li>Exploitation of <a href="http://www.w3.org/RDF/">RDF</a> technology
- to manage metadata and <b>compliance with the main requirements</b> for
-an RDF query language. In particular:</li>
-
- </ol>
-
- <blockquote>
- <ul>
- <li>MathQL-1 provides facilities for hierarchical constraints
-based on <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-schema/">RDF Schema</a> and for
-traversal of compound values of properties.</li>
-
- </ul>
-
- <ul>
- <li>MathQL-1 provides a full set of Boolean operators to compose
- the query constraints and facilities for selecting URI's or literals by
-means of regular expressions.</li>
-
- </ul>
-
- <ul>
- <li>MathQL-1 allows to customize the query results specifying
-what part of a solution should be preserved or discarded.</li>
-
- </ul>
-
- <ul>
- <li>MathQL-1 has a well-conceived semantics defined in term of
- an abstract metadata model, imposes that queries return exhaustive solutions
- and includes a "select-from-where"-like construction.</li>
-
- </ul>
-
- <ul>
- <li>MathQL-1 supports a machine-processable <a
- href="http://www.w3.org/XML/">XML</a> syntax as well as a human-readable
- textual syntax to achieve the best usability.<br>
- </li>
-
- </ul>
- </blockquote>
-
- <ol start="2">
- <li>Careful <b>treatment of query results</b> that are as important
- as the queries themselves. In particular:<br>
- </li>
-
- </ol>
-
- <blockquote>
- <ul>
- <li>MathQL-1 query results have a 4-dimensional geometry whereas
- other languages assume that query results are returned in 1-dimensional
-structures (ie lists of resources) or 2-dimensional structures (ie relational
-database tables). This allows to get better outcomes from queries returning
-structured results.<br>
- </li>
-
- </ul>
-
- <ul>
- <li>Besides the syntax for queries, MathQL-1 provides a syntax
- for query results with its own rigorously defined semantics.<br>
- </li>
-
- </ul>
- </blockquote>
-
- <ol start="3">
- <li>Exploitation of <b>constructions borrowed from programming
-languages</b> to allow sophisticated queries that need computation over
-the queried data. In particular:<br>
- </li>
-
- </ol>
-
- <blockquote>
- <ul>
- <li>MathQL-1 supports variables for storing intermediate query
- results, provides iterators over these results, has a conditional operator
- and includes logging facilities for debugging purposes.</li>
-
- </ul>
- </blockquote>
- </td>
- </tr>
-
- </tbody>
-</table>
- <br>
- <br>
- <br>
-</body>
-</html>