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Re: SemWeb again

• To: John Cowan <jcowan@r...>
• Subject: Re: SemWeb again
• From: Paul Prescod <paul@p...>
• Date: Wed, 24 Apr 2002 14:44:30 -0700
• Cc: Mike Champion <mc@x...>, xml-dev <xml-dev@l...>, Uche Ogbuji <uogbuji@f...>, molson@f...
• References: <200204242117.RAA09051@m...>

John Cowan wrote:
> 
>...
> 
> No flame here.  But you could ask our customers who are paying a 10%
> premium for XHTML news with RDF-format SNOMED, vs. those who just get
> the XHTML, whether *they* consider it worthwhile.  I grant that this
> is not really a proper comparison, as I doubt whether any of them are
> using general RDF tools.  

This is at the heart of what will make RDF succeed or fail. Today people
use XML data that "happens" to be RDF compatible in exactly the same way
that they do regular XML data. RDF will start to succeed if and when
tools arise and gain currency that take advantage of the RDF-ness of the
data. I am thinking in particular about:

 * query engines
 * validators
 * data binding APIs

The Fourthought guys convinced me that they were making practical use of
RDF precisely because they have a bunch of RDF-level tools that they
use. I think about these tools as being roughly analogous to SQL, except
that the data source is graph-structured XML rather than a relational
database. In that sense I don't see anything fanciful or AI-ish about it
at all. They should talk about it as the "neo-relational web".

 Paul Prescod

• References:
  • Re: SemWeb again
    • From: John Cowan <jcowan@r...>

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