[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: RE: XML/RDF
On Mon, 2002-11-04 at 20:22, Mike Champion wrote: > So, I would really like to understand what benefit one might > really get from using an RDF-friendly XML syntax. Eric van der > Vlist (perhaps offlist) once mentioned that XML.fr uses the RDFness > of RSS 1.0 to categorize articles via an RDF taxonomy/ontology. Hey! That's competitive advantage, why should I share this :-) ! > I'm not hostile to RDF (for localized domains in which effective > taxonomies exist, anyway, don't get me started about the "Semantic Web"), > just skeptical that it's worth a significant investment of my time. > Does anyone want to try to persuade us skeptics that RDF's time > has come? My take on this doesn't go that far and I think that RDF is already a valuable format and paradigm for storing and retrieving information without thinking of the Semantic Web! Simon was mentioning RDF as being a straigtjacket and I think that it's true for some cases (it's really a pity that RDF doesn't handle mixed content for instance) but that the other models are straitjackets compared to RDF as soon as you've loaded your RDF in a RDF database and selected a RDF query language. RDBMS with their tables are straitjackets: tables are not natural at all and in the real world, different rows don't have the same number of columns... XML and it's tree model is a straitjacket too to model the external world since we know at least since Copernic that there isn't a single root in the universe... RDF and its triples is really lightweight when you have the right tools to manipulate them. I like to think of them as a RDBMS whith a variable geometry: each "row" (ie each subject) can have a variable number of columns (properties). It's like a RDBMS which you could populate before having writen any schema, that's really very flexible and it's just a matter of using the right tool. When I use such a tool, I have a feeling of RDBMS without its straitjacket :-) ... Now, why would you want to take the pain of making a XML vocabulary RDF friendly? My answer (probably heretic for a RDF purist) is to keep the possibility to use such a tool in the future if your application grows and needs it. Of course it's a matter of tradeoff and if the pain is higher than the expected benefit, go for plain XML: you'll always be able to develop a XSLT tranformation later on. Eric -- Curious about Relax NG? My book in progress is waiting for your review! http://books.xmlschemata.org/relaxng/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Eric van der Vlist http://xmlfr.org http://dyomedea.com (W3C) XML Schema ISBN:0-596-00252-1 http://oreilly.com/catalog/xmlschema ------------------------------------------------------------------------
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