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> At 09:33 AM 4/6/01 -0400, Michael Champion wrote: > >The xmlhack article about the turmoil in the XML Topic Maps world > >http://xmlhack.com/read.php?item=1158 got me wondering yet again: > >CONCEPTUALLY (not syntactically, politically, religiously, or > >organizationally), what are the similarities and and the differences among > >XTM topic maps, XLink link bases, and RDF knowledge bases (or whatever the > >correct term for a "web" of RDF is)? > > Even though XLink and RDF are targeted at different purposes, it's still a > fair observation that XLink has a lot (not all) of the power of RDF. For > info on a suggested way to map XLink to RDF, see the note "Harvesting RDF > Statements from XLinks": > > http://www.w3.org/TR/xlink2rdf/ I strongly disagree with this. Just because basic RDF graphs can be "harvested" from XLink doesn't mean that XLink has a lot of the power of RDF. RDF can be harvested from HTML as well, but that says nothing about the power of HTML relative to RDF. With enough contrivance, one can, of course, get everything RDF can do in XLink, for instance, one could use XPointers referring to XLink elements to simulate reification, and one could concoct a schema system, but this isn't a useful counter to RDF's facility. And then again there are aspects of RDF that are pretty much outside the capacity of XLink, such as the flexibility of RDF's XML serialization (which can be burden as much as boon, but is a fact). I actually don't think there's much overlap between RDF and XLink at all. -- Uche Ogbuji Principal Consultant uche.ogbuji@f... +1 303 583 9900 x 101 Fourthought, Inc. http://Fourthought.com 4735 East Walnut St, Ste. C, Boulder, CO 80301-2537, USA Software-engineering, knowledge-management, XML, CORBA, Linux, Python
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