[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: RDF Sample, ICAO Airport Codes
Hi David, After reading your comments it appeared to me that tacitly you have this model (please correct me if this is wrong, I just guessed it from trying to understand your position) a) XML DTD based documents are more documents in the classical sense like for instance a report, a book, etc... b) RDF based document are more for data exchange and more particularly for data base data exchange. The former allows you to add meta-information in your documents by adding meaningful tags in your text. The latter, because of a more formal schema definition, and also because rdf has to the notion of record (implicitly), it is more suited to data base exchange which, by the way, is also record based and these records are defined by a formal schema. Is this what you have in mind? 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: Saturday, July 31, 1999 6:50 AM To: xml-dev@i... Subject: Re: RDF Sample, ICAO Airport Codes James Robertson writes: > Wouldn't a validatable format with a DTD > be more useful for storing data? > > ie. plain vanilla XML? Why not just ASCII? > Otherwise, aren't we advocating abandoning XML for a > another format? One that loses the ability to be > verified, except with the use of custom-written software. I could write a DTD for my airport example if I wanted, but I see little value; instead, I'd probably use the W3C's proposed RDF-schema language, since it works at the right semantic level. Besides, while DTDs are useful, they allow validation of only a tiny subset of business rules: as I mentioned in a recent discussion within the W3C, a DTD can ensure that HTML <h1> doesn't appear within <p>, but it cannot ensure that the text in it is actually a descriptive section title. > In other words, if RDF is intended for storage of data, > what's XML for? If XML is intended for the representation of documents, what's ASCII for? Good application design (like good system design) requires a layered approach: - if a lot of people need to extract a stream of characters from many different byte encodings, you invent a standard (like Unicode) so that they can all refer to a common set of characters in the abstract; - if a lot of people need to extract a tree structure from a stream of characters, you invent a standard (like SGML or XML) so that they can all use standard software tools rather than rolling their own; - if a lot of people need to relabel the tree nodes with universally-identifiable and unique names, you invent a standard (like Namespaces in XML or Architectural Forms) so that they can all use standard software tools rather than rolling their own; - if a lot of people need to extract a set of objects from the tree, you invent a standard (like RDF or XMI) so that they can all use standard software tools rather than rolling their own. 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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