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RE: The perils of P18S (was Re: Why RDF is hard )


assumption tracker

>> RDF/XML may be butt-ugly and confusing, but IMHO the model is quite
>the
>> opposite.
>
>I have no problem with RDF data model although I don't see anything
>special about it.

Quoting Joshua Allen it makes it "...possible for anyone in the world to
publish
assertions about things in such a way that everyone else in the world
can locate them, use them, and in turn make assertions about them."

I don't know of any other standard with that power.

>> I have yet to see an XML application that couldn't be done without
>XML, so
>> that argument isn't particularly strong. The point is that in the same
>way
>> a lot of applications are considerably easier to implement using XML,
>> quite a few applications are considerably easier with RDF, and such
>> practical applications are now popping up all over the place.
>
>You can't compare XML with RDF.

I was only trying to demonstrate that your argument was effectively
impossible to refute, but didn't actually prove very much :

"I have yet to see a single successful application of [technology X] that
couldn't be done without [technology X]."

If you had said "I have yet to see a single successful application of RDF
that couldn't be done better, or more easily without RDF", then I would have
had more to chew on.

 XML was generally accepted with minimum
>controversy except from SGML folks.  RDF, on the other hand, is
>extremely controversial.

There are quite a few RDBMS people who would also disagree on the first
point.
But again, that something causes controversy really says little about its
merits. There are concerns, fine - that's what xml-dev and other such forums
are for. I don't think there's any need for someone to walk in front of
horseless markup carrying a red flag though.

Open Directory Project and RSS 1.0 use RDF,
>but they didn't really need it.

In both cases RDF adds considerable advantages, at very little cost. I admit
that if you judge the applications in isolation and with frozen requirements
then there isn't much benefit. For a one-off, standalone directory there is
little to be gained from using RDF (though not having to build a model
entirely from scratch is a time saver). The use of RDF means that dmoz can
be easily extended in all directions. The RDF nature of RSS 1.0 means that
it is also extensible without reinventing the wheel for every new feature.

A slightly different, less vertical view is required to see the greatest
advantages. For example, RSS 1.0 can *with no modification* use categories
from the Open Directory. An blogger-like application that took advantage of
this could for example place its content directly into the Open Directory,
and going the other way, when displaying the blog entries it could pull out
'what's related' items from the Open Directory. Ok, there's work involve in
setting up the processing to do this, but a large, potentially difficult
part of the work (the model) has already been done. What's more the same
processing system could be used with other sources of data, for instance the
images and documents produced by Adobe's tools (which now incorporate RDF).

 I don't know what practical RDF
>applications you are talking about.  If they are indeed 'popping up all
>over the place' now, what were RDF folks doing all this time?

The WG group have been very busy improving the specs and developers have
been producing things along the lines of the list I've pasted again below.

Cheers,
Danny.


Data integration :
B2B web service mediation
Catalogue integration
Database integration example
Financial Portals
Gene Ontology
Mozilla
eScience Data Grids

Data-dependent agents :
Financial Assistant
ITTalks
Jema
Shopping assistants
Virtual Travel Agent

Knowledge management :
Community formation
Community portals
Helpdesk support
OntoShare - community of practice support
PatMan
PlanetOnto
Sun GKE
ePerson

Semantic indexing and semantic portals :
Community Arkive
Community portals
Context aware links
Curriculum Online
Distributed topic portals
HP Portal
ITTalks
Museum portals
MusicBrainz
PlanetOnto
Score
Semantic tagging
TAP semantic search

Personal information management :
Bibliography workbench
Community bookmarking
Event tracking
Genealogy assistant
Haystack
Ideas workbench
Jema
Mozilla
ePerson

Metadata for annotating and enriching :
Annotea
Assumption tracker
Bibliography workbench
Community Arkive
Community bookmarking
Distributed topic portals
EARL
Gene Ontology
MIT/HP SIMILE project

Metadata for description, discovery and selection :
B2B trading market-places
DCMI registry
Edutella
HP Portal
MIT/HP SIMILE project
MUSE
Recommendation Networks
Scholnet
SeLeNe
Semantic tagging
Sun GKE
Web service description and discovery

Metadata for media and content :
Adobe XMP
Arkive internal
MIT/HP SIMILE project

Knowledge formation :
Assumption tracker
Bibliography workbench
ClaiMaker/Scholonto
Community Arkive
Community formation
DMOZ - Directory Mozilla - open directory
Ideas workbench
SWAP - semantic web and peer-to-peer

Catalogue and Thesaurus management :
Catalogue Management
Catalogue integration
DMOZ - Directory Mozilla - open directory
Thesaurus management

Syndication :
Event tracking
Rich Site Summary/RDF Site summary
Syndication



[1]
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/reports/open_demonstrators/hp-applications-
survey.html#Catalogue%20integration
see also
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/reports/open_demonstrators/hp-applications-
selection.html



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