[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: RDF for unstructured databases, RDF for axiomatic systems
shelleyp@b... (Shelley Powers) writes: >I think, in many ways, that's what many of the objectors have against >RDF/XML -- you have to have some pre-knowledge of RDF in order to >read it, write it, work with it, and truly understand it. I think there are two serious questions any time people move from a "just XML" perspective to the "new, improved RDF" perspective. The first is learning the RDF model. While the core of that model is pretty simple (I think Jonathan Borden has said it takes only one slide), figuring out how RDF really works is more complicated. Anyone who has doubts about the intrinsic crunchy goodness of URIs is liable to have an aneurysm during any serious encounter with RDF. The Concept and Abstract Syntax document is pretty good for what it does, but the RDF model still requires a rather different level of modeling than does XML document markup - a level I see as unnecessarily complicating in the vast majority of cases where markup is being used. (I vastly prefer patterns embedded directly in documents to patterns you have to assemble in your head outside of the document by linking chains of abstract identifiers.) The second issue is what I see as a more or less permanent mismatch between RDF's graph model and XML's hierarchical model, which produces some serious syntactic complications. Jonathan Borden has done very well recently with his revised RDDL/RDF, but I think he's mostly achieved it by hiding the RDF impact on the XML syntax to the maximum extent possible. (It's very reassuring to see that this is possible, actually.) >So then the question becomes: Is the issue really about the existing >RDF/XML? Or is it about the complexity of the RDF model? I think we >need to be very sure about this before we run off into alternative >syntax tangents. For me, it's definitely about both. I can read the RDF model, but have no interest at all in using it to model anything more complicated than about a FOAF file. For the modeling I need to do, the XML BB gun is much more appropriate than the RDF Gatling Gun, and far less likely to cause collateral damage. The existing RDF/XML looks ridiculous to me, and I find its odd bouncing off qualified/unqualified attributes to be a warning sign for the XML namespaces specs, but I think a lot of that has to do with basic incompatibilities between the models. ------------- Simon St.Laurent - SSL is my TLA http://simonstl.com may be my URI http://monasticxml.org may be my ascetic URI urn:oid:1.3.6.1.4.1.6320 is another possibility altogether
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