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RE: The Semantic Web: An Introduction

• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
• To: James Strachan <james_strachan@y...>,"Sean B. Palmer" <sean@m...>, xml-dev@l...
• Date: Tue, 18 Sep 2001 11:47:16 -0500

One should not confuse "data on the web" as 
a purely Semantic Web notion.  Providing a 
semantic cue and a structure to data is 
markup in its most basic form and most 
other databases as well.  Ontologies as 
such, are classification systems and not 
novel.   So far, the distinguishing charcteristic 
of the Semantic Web effort is to add the 
well-known but non-interoperable technologies 
of inferencing engines to the web architectures.

A cursory review suggests that RDF is well 
suited to inference-capable databases (eg, 
expert system types with chaining, a la 
prolog).  Given that XML is only a syntax 
for creating languages, it is the responsibility 
of the application developer to determine 
the suitability and applicability of any 
given XML-conformant language.  A pure RDF 
web is very unlikely.  How data strutured with an 
XML Schema and systems using RDF classifications 
are to interoperate is a good question that 
should be explored by this list.

Len 
http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard

Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti.
Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h


-----Original Message-----
From: James Strachan [mailto:james_strachan@y...]

Are there Semantic Web efforts out there to assume the worst case, that data
is available in 'just' XML along with maybe some kind of schema (DTD /
RelaxNG / XML Schema), and to just adorn and work with that, rather than
wait for the world to go RDF? Or to generate RDF given an instance XML
document based on an XSLT / XPath / Schematron kind of mechanism?

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