- Short Name: min-max-propery-path
- SEP Number: SEP-0003
- Author: Jerven Bolleman
In the SPARQL 1.1. working group, a form of bounded property path where supported in the late drafts. The form being a path element elt, followed by a curly bracket enclosed min/max pattern.
| Syntax Form | Matches |
|---|---|
| elt{n,m} | A path of between n and m occurrences of elt. |
| elt{n} | A path of exactly n occurrences of elt. |
| elt{n,} | A path of n or more occurrences of elt. |
| elt{,n} | A path of between 0 and n occurrences of elt. |
This was removed in later draft and recommondation, upon the change to non-counting semantics.
Such connectivity matching does not introduce duplicates (it does not incorporate any count of the number of ways the connection can be made) even if the repeated path itself would otherwise result in duplicates.
The functionality of limited connectivity checks is still valid with non-counting semantics, in pragmatic terms.
As raised in sparql-dev#101, it would be nice to have this functionality available in SPARQL.
Pragmatically many stores already implement the form {,max} as the * and + versions are implicitly limited.
An alternative is that this could be reintroduces with counting semantics.
TODO: To be filled in when/if such evidence becomes available
This proposal is purely additive to SPARQL 1.1.