[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: RDF Sample, ICAO Airport Codes
Hi David, In fact, originally RDF was designed to provide metadata about resources. However, we can say that its rich definition constructs make it a perfect candidate to data exchange. Or said differently, a way to exchange data base data. A RDF element or description could be easily associated to a record. We can then say that RDF provided some interesting side effects not necessarily originally intended :-). In your example you used URLs and more particularly http based URLs, I am not so sure it is the right kind of URI to uniquely identify a record or more particularly to uniquely identify a record in an exchange format between databases. It would be better to employ a location independent or more simply a protocol agnostic URI for the element's identification. regards Didier PH Martin mailto:martind@n... http://www.netfolder.com -----Original Message----- From: owner-xml-dev@i... [mailto:owner-xml-dev@i...]On Behalf Of David Megginson Sent: Friday, July 30, 1999 1:47 PM To: xml-dev@i... Subject: Re: RDF Sample, ICAO Airport Codes Satya.Rao@c... writes: > The first line in RDF specification says > > "The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a foundation for processing > metadata" > > I thought this is the major use of the RDF. For serializing the > entities can't we use XML? RDF is a layer of abstraction that can be used on top of XML to provide a better view of serialized objects. If lots of applications need to process serialized objects, it doesn't make sense to force them all to do fairly low-level XML handling: applications for data exchange will usually care about entities (objects) and their attributes and relationships (properties), not about elements, attributes, and character data. By way of illustration, here are the major layers involved in one particular (imaginary) process: 1. UTF-8 encoding - specifies the actual character encoding used in a file. 2. Unicode - specifies the abstract character points available, without requiring specific knowledge of the character encoding used. 3. XML - specifies a serialized version of a tree with typed nodes, without requiring specific knowledge of the characters used. 4. RDF - specifies the interpretation of the tree as a series of entities with attributes and relationships, without requiring specific knowledge of the elements and attributes used. 5. Application - processes the entities in the abstract, and builds a domain-specific object tree. 6. Database - stores the object tree in SQL tables. If you make the jump straight from #3 to #6 (for example), you'll have to write and maintain a lot of unnecessary code. All the best, David -- David Megginson david@m... http://www.megginson.com/ xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1 To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...) xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1 To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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