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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Linkbases, Topic Maps, and RDF Knowledge Bases -- help me
 John Cowan (on the mark, as usual): > Here's my take on it, which surely is not complete and may not be > 100% correct. By "resources" I mean the W3C sense: anything which > has an URI. > > 1) RDF expresses *binary relations* between *resources*, and also relations > between a resource and a literal string. Yes, but it does provide a mechanism for expressing N-ary relationships, and at a certain conceptual level, an N-ary relationship is simply an specialized arrangement of binary relationships. The argument I've most heard against this is that it is inefficient, but I think this is only a problem is you take RDF's serialization model too literally in your code. There is no reason not to directly model N-ary relationships in an RDF system to gain efficiency. > 2) XLink expresses *multi-way* relations (with role labels) between > resources, and also specifies preferred traversal paths (arcs) between > the related resources. > > 3) XTM expresses multi-way relations (with role labels) between > *topics*, where topics represent subject matters, which may be either > themselves resources or non-addressable objects (like people) who can > be described by resources. XTM is really a higher-layer level, as you say, of N-ary relationships which can be implemented using RDF and XLink, althrough based on my recent expereinces, there's no doubt to me that RDF is the superior tool for a Topic Maps basis, which is why Eric van der Vlist's work http://xmlhack.com/read.php?item=1108 Is a good thing. I've often talked about developing an RTM, but my itch has not been great enough to scratch. Eric's paved the way here. -- Uche Ogbuji Principal Consultant uche.ogbuji@f... +1 303 583 9900 x 101 Fourthought, Inc. http://Fourthought.com 4735 East Walnut St, Ste. C, Boulder, CO 80301-2537, USA Software-engineering, knowledge-management, XML, CORBA, Linux, Python 
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