[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message]

Re: XML/RDF

• To: Mike Champion <mc@x...>, xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: XML/RDF
• From: Paul Prescod <paul@p...>
• Date: Fri, 08 Nov 2002 10:17:31 -0800
• References: <4NM3ZYSGAJINK93545YPO4W3VTDCC0.3dc6c90e@MChamp>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20020826

Mike Champion wrote:
>...
> 
> I'm not hostile to RDF (for localized domains in which effective
> taxonomies exist, anyway, don't get me started about the "Semantic Web"),

What do you think the Semantic Web is? To me, it is just the union of 
the localized domains with links between them where possible. If there 
is value in the localized domains, why would the integration of them 
into a Web of links be problematic?

> just skeptical that it's worth a significant investment of my time.
> Does anyone want to try to persuade us skeptics that RDF's time
> has come?

Although I'm no fan of RDF's XML syntax, I would say that one of the 
major benefits of RDF (beyond the tools, of course) is that with OWL (or 
DAML) RDF is much more naturally extensible and integratable than plain 
old XML. For instance if you have a property called isSon, I can say 
that implies my isChild property and its inverse isParent. I can also 
say that your isSon proprty implies my isMale property. Those are 
important forms of extensibility. Of course it is easy to make those 
kinds of assertions in Java or Python code but only using SemWeb 
technologies can I publish those assertions in a standardized manner so 
that someone else can build upon them.

For instance, if a third party knows about my isMale property and they 
see my assertion about its relationship to your isSon property then they 
now know something important about isSon.

  Paul Prescod

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: XML/RDF
    • From: Mike Champion <mc@x...>

• References:
  • Re: RE: XML/RDF
    • From: Mike Champion <mc@x...>

• Prev by Date: RE: Problems using XML Schema validated input document with Xerces
• Next by Date: RE: XML/RDF
• Previous by thread: Re: RE: XML/RDF
• Next by thread: Re: XML/RDF
• Index(es):
  • Date
  • Thread