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RE: Meta-somethingorother (was the semantic webmega-permathrea

• To: "Joshua Allen" <joshuaa@m...>
• Subject: RE: Meta-somethingorother (was the semantic webmega-permathread thing)
• From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@m...>
• Date: Fri, 11 Jun 2004 07:29:10 -0400
• Cc: "XML Developers List" <xml-dev@l...>
• In-reply-to: <0E36FD96D96FCA4AA8E8F2D199320E520212EC67@R...>
• References: <0E36FD96D96FCA4AA8E8F2D199320E520212EC67@R...>

At 2:04 PM -0700 6/10/04, Joshua Allen wrote:

>Hold on; if you publish in RDF, then you *are* publishing in
>XML+Namespaces.

Yes, we know.  However, we're trying to decide if bothering with RDF 
triples as compared to any other reasaonable and obvious XML format 
buys us anything.

>I thought the question was, "when modeling data (presumably for
>interchange), should you model it using XML data model or RDF data
>model?"

There is no XML data model, certainly not one equivalent to the RDF 
data model. There is only XML syntax.

>Getting RDF *syntax* out of the picture, just think of modeling *any*
>data in XML.
>
>Is it ever a best practice to model your XML data in such a way that:
>a) it represents a collection of real-world "items" with "properties"
>b) all nodes which represent property names are clearly distinguished
>(no implicit property names, conventions are clear, etc.) from actual
>items or property values
>c) optionally, all "items" have IDs which can be referenced in property
>values
>
>IOW, even if you do not use RDF, do you ever find that it's a best
>practice to model your data in the way that RDF would?
>
>I think the answer is "sometimes".  I suspect that Elliotte has built
>real-world schemas that are practically equivalent data model to RDF.  I
>wouldn't challenge him to defend *why* he did it, because sometimes it
>just makes sense.  Sometimes it doesn't.  I don't see a controversy
>here.

I'm not sure I ever have written such a schema. I thyink I tend to 
make what you're calling properties element names rather than a 
complete separate element or node, but maybe I'm not quite following 
you. However, even if I have written such schemas, my data model that 
I use to generate the document may not be the data model that others 
use to process the document. The data model is local. Different data 
models can be applied to the same document. Unlike RDF's canonical 
triples/subject-predicate-object model there is no one data model for 
XML.

-- 

   Elliotte Rusty Harold
   elharo@m...
   Effective XML (Addison-Wesley, 2003)
   http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/effectivexml
   http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0321150406/ref%3Dnosim/cafeaulaitA

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    • From: "Joshua Allen" <joshuaa@m...>

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