[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Content or Metadata?
From: Robin Cover <robin@i...> >Of course, such notions reflect perspective, which may or may >not be implicit/explicit in the style rules and underlying >assumptions of the house. For all its sins, RDF showed up a major area that is currently missing in Schemas: the need to make the generic relationships between elements explicit. In particular RDF used "bag", "seq" and "alt". But there are many more such relationships: * is one element an annotation of another? * is that annotation superior (e.g. a title, a summary) or subsidiary (e.g., an explaination, a digression, an alternative, a role)? * does one element/attribute have any meaning without some other element/attribute (e.g., does a particular number also require a units element/attribute/default)? * which roles do elements and atributes play in the particular taxonomic/ontological methodology of their creator (e.g., what is data, what is metadata)? Some of these things, RDF Schemas could make possible, and XLink could have made possible. I think RDF is a continual reminder that GIs and containment may make relationships obvious to humans, but in the absense of other conventions, they may hide these relationships from the computer. B.t.w, the sins of RDF were all commented on at the time: * the spec is clearly two or three different different documents cobbled together with little cohesion between them; * having a syntax like the _n attribute names which made validation impossible except by special-purpose validators; * not having the discipline of a DTD fragment, so that some elements mentioned are never explicitly given in the EBNF productions; * RDF is a framework but it should have been an architecture which is framework-neutral. The test of whether it is useful as a framework are whether generic tools are useful for RDF data; if, in fact, it is being mainly used for specific applications, then RDF markup would be better formulated as conventions that sit on top of DTDs/schemas that allow as natural modeling of the data as possible. I think RDF should have concentrated on how to fit on top of regular markup, including markup of inline elements interspersed through paragraphs. Atomic data is just the simplest case of that. Rick Jelliffe 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 unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; unsubscribe 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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