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Re: RDF and the new releases

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: RDF and the new releases
• From: Uche Ogbuji <uche.ogbuji@f...>
• Date: Fri, 15 Nov 2002 09:27:25 -0700
• In-reply-to: Message from Matt Gushee <mgushee@h...> of "Fri, 15 Nov 2002 08:40:43 MST." <20021115154042.GA14542@swordfish>
• Sender: uche.ogbuji@f...

Matt Gushee:

> As
>     Simon St.Laurent wrote:
> 
> > There's a serious divide between the two approaches.  I'm very impressed
> > by some of the people who do regularly cross between XML and RDF and
> > that they can keep their heads straight as they do so.
> 
> Yes, and I think the RDF model is not at all hard to understand:
> ignoring the standard terminology, it's all about objects with named
> properties. What could be simpler? But the XML syntax seems to obscure
> the simplicity of the model. I believe the source of the confusion is
> that people expect the structure of an XML-RDF document to reflect the
> structure of the underlying graph ... but very often it doesn't.

Yes, Matt.  You're exactly right.  Even as long as I've been using RDF, it 
takes me a while to look at a modest RDF/XML example and picture the graph in 
my head.

I think this is a criticism of RDF/XML, but I don't know that I have a ready 
alternative approach.

The main problem is that XML is hierarchical, and so it is almost inevitable 
that one will have to scatter all the properties of a node around the whole 
document, making it hard for a human to piece together.  To some extent, this 
is inevitable because it's not easy to represent graphs in any textual format, 
but the verbose overhead of XML makes it harder.


-- 
Uche Ogbuji                                    Fourthought, Inc.
http://uche.ogbuji.net    http://4Suite.org    http://fourthought.com
Python&XML column: 2. Introducing PyXML - http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/09/25/p
y.html
The Past, Present and Future of Web Services 1 - http://www.webservices.org/ind
ex.php/article/articleview/663/1/24/
The Past, Present and Future of Web Services 2 - 'http://www.webservices.org/in
dex.php/article/articleview/679/1/24/
Serenity through markup - http://adtmag.com/article.asp?id=6807
Tip: Using generators for XML processing - http://www-106.ibm.com/developerwork
s/xml/library/x-tipgenr.html

• References:
  • Re: RDF and the new releases
    • From: Matt Gushee <mgushee@h...>

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