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RE: What is the purpose of RDF Schema? was RE: What is the natureofHTML4

• From: Jonathan Borden <jborden@m...>
• To: Eric van der Vlist <vdv@d...>
• Date: Sun, 28 Jan 2001 11:09:29 -0500

Eric van der Vlist wrote:
>
> Jonathan Borden wrote:
> >
> > >
> > >
> > > The nature of a RDF document would obviously be
> > > "http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#", then.
> >
> > yep.

   One point about this. RDF would be a general nature for any such
document, but we can assign a more specific nature to, for example, an RSS
document.

>
> My request is for describing a location for a RDF document containing
> the same information than the RDDL but using a RDF syntax.
>
> This could be used as a pointer by tools/applications that would prefer
> a RDF syntax instead of the XLink one...

That's another discussion. The problem with the current RDF 1.0 Syntax is
that it essentially requires RDF aware namespace URIs, and can have really
big problems with arbitrary namespace URIs, in particular
http://www.w3.org/2000/10/XMLSchema where the RDF way of converting such a
qname into a URI is simply broken. For example the qname:

xsd:complexContent converts to the URI
http://www.w3.org/2000/10/XMLSchemacomplexContent by RDF's broken rule of
simple concatenation of the namespace and localName.

obviously the correct URI is:
http://www.w3.org/2000/10/XMLSchema#complexContent (if there is any question
about this  dereference the URI!)

So, anyways, RDF syntax requires RDF aware namespace URIs (those with the
trailing '#' or '/')... note that TimBL's alternate RDF syntax: N3
automatically appends a '#' to a namespace URI.

But in any case it is perfectly reasonable to want to generically represent
an 'alternate' and I've added it to purposes.html

Note: RDDL need not only use natures and purposes defined at
http://www.rddl.org/natures and http://www.rddl.org/purposes, these are
provided as 'well known', and hopefully useful, natures and purposes. RDDL
Applications are free to develop and use specialized RDDL vocabularies. RDDL
vocabularies can be developed according to the style of natures.html and
purposes.html or via other ways of creating a vocabulary such as RDFS or
DAML+OIL. The advantage of a RDDL vocabulary is that it is human readable.

>
> When the pointer is missing, they can always perform a XSLT
> transformation, but when the document is also published as RDF why
> wouldn't they use it directly ?

Sure, the purpose of RDDL is to provide human and machine readable choices
that can be selected according to nature and purpose.

> Eric (trying to reconciliate two worlds)

-Jonathan (trying to allow people and machines to play nice together :-)

• References:
  • Re: What is the purpose of RDF Schema? was RE: What is the nature ofHTML4.0?
    • From: Eric van der Vlist <vdv@d...>

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