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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Meta-somethingorother (was the semantic webmega-permathrea
 Hi Bill, > By the way, I don't use RDF/OWL for doing like ontology work or > defining document formats. > Me too and this is why I like prototype/instance based languages like for instance self or ECMAScript. When a platonic approach is taken everything is constrained by a strict schema and this obviously restricts the combinations you can do when dealing with a plethora of sources. In contrast to this approach I consider a bundled set of RDF statements (i.e. an rdf description) like a prototype, a subjective view on a resource. From there, I can either manually or automatically merge the different point of views about a resource. In other words the schema emerges from the prototypes instead of from an instantiation of occurrences originated from a deistic classification. For my own work and since ProjectX (the ancestor of the semantic web) I tend to consider rdf descriptions as a set of properties as we did in MCL. This frame of mind is a lot easier to deal with than graphs (obviously a view on an abstract concept of property ownership) or triples. I simply see the rdf descriptions as a set of properties. The more I have properties about a resource the more I complete my knowledge about this resource. Merging property sets is a knowledge acquisition process. I have to think about the resource, analyze or set rules to decide what is the best point of view (statement about a resource). Like in MCL, having property sets organized as arrays (only one level under an element) is useful and arrays are easier to merge or merging rules are easier to define since they more easily conform to set theory operators (as previously demonstrated by Cod). To create hierarchies we simply need a property to act as a link to other property sets. As we all know it's quite easy to create hierarchies from arrays. Having arrays in separate chunks, helps a lot to recombine them. In hierarchies we often have to cut, extract subset to recombine them. This is what languages like DSSSL or XSLT do. In the case of DSSSL the whole hierarchy is perceived a list of list or dynamic arrays; reducing the levels as dynamic arrays allows performing the combinations. In other words, there is a lot of advantages form the operational point of view when data are organized as arrays (i.e. property sets). Matter of choice... Cheers Didier PH Martin 
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