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On Fri, September 22, 2006 2:09 pm, Nathan Young -X \(natyoung - Artizen at Cisco\) wrote: > As far as I understand it, topic maps match what you describe below in > significant ways. All right, you asked for it: if a link is a specific relationship between two identifiable resources--a relationship that can be implemented with a hypertext link or with whatever rendering a given medium is capable of--and we want to express that link in such a way that the link itself can have its own metadata, then RDF can do this quite well. It's particularly good at out-of-line links (and RDF/XML is particularly bad at inline links). I'm only half serious, but I do think that RDF and Topic Maps played a serious role in XLink's failure, which was mostly due to the lack of a community that was excited about XLink enough to implement and promote it. (We all know that a spec doesn't have to be good to have such a community built around it.) People interested in building applications on top of device-independent methods for expressing information relationships hopped on the RDF and Topic Map trains, and the XLink train sat in the station waiting for more passengers than the XBRL folk. I wrote an article summarizing XLink's lack of success in XML.com over four years ago (http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/03/13/xlink.html). While I was embarrassed when Tony Coates pointed out that I had failed to mention XBRL, a very successful project that uses a lot of XLink, that was about it. I don't see how things have changed since then, outside of XBRL's own growth. Bob
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