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RE: RDF syntax

• To: "'Simon St.Laurent'" <simonstl@s...>, <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: RE: RDF syntax
• From: "Bob Wyman" <bob@w...>
• Date: Sun, 2 Nov 2003 20:02:08 -0500
• Importance: Normal
• In-reply-to: <r02000200-1028-5CA1F01E0D8411D8A92B0003937A08C2@[192.168.124.11]>
• Reply-to: <bob@w...>

Simon St. Laurent wrote:
> I frequently wish the RDF community would use N3 instead and drop 
> the pretense, but that doesn't seem universally plausible.  Maybe 
> they can develop an ASN.1 format...
	I have a feeling that the reference to ASN.1 was probably
meant to be humorous... Nonetheless, there is actually great merit to
what you've suggested.
	The issue being discussed in this thread is the *syntax* for
RDF encodings rather than the abstract data model. If RDF were defined
in ASN.1 (Abstract Syntax Notation), the representational issues
associated with encoding in one form or another could be separated
from the much more interesting issues of what you can do with RDF-like
data. How do you reason with it? etc.
	A definition of RDF in ASN.1 would, I think, reveal the
simplicity, the beauty and power of RDF in a way that the current
documents hide with their oppressive focus on obscure encoding issues
and options. An ASN.1 syntax for RDF would be almost as simple as what
is described in the RDF Abstract Syntax definition (see:
http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-concepts/). In other words, it would simply
define a triple (subject, predicate, object) and provide for graphs of
triples. Just about everything from there on is encoding notation and
has little to do with the way that data is processed by programs or
thought about by humans... Given an ASN.1 syntax for RDF, we could all
focus on the information, not it's encoding.

		bob wyman

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