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Re: Meta-somethingorother (was the semantic webmega-permathrea

• To: Jonathan Borden <jonathan@o...>
• Subject: Re: Meta-somethingorother (was the semantic webmega-permathread thing)
• From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@m...>
• Date: Wed, 9 Jun 2004 20:25:17 -0400
• Cc: XML Developers List <xml-dev@l...>
• In-reply-to: <FAFA417C-BA71-11D8-ACF4-000A95BA5A2C@o...>
• References: <0E36FD96D96FCA4AA8E8F2D199320E52020E8337@R...> <A6B1F79A-B9A4-11D8-B347-000A95CCC59E@x...><40C66B6D.2060902@p...> <p06010204bcecbcf9b0da@[192.168.254.88]><40C72FE2.20600@p...> <p06010207bced14683bad@[192.168.254.88]><FAFA417C-BA71-11D8-ACF4-000A95BA5A2C@o...>

At 8:06 PM -0400 6/9/04, Jonathan Borden wrote:
>  Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:
>>   I want to see the RDF programs that could not equally easily be 
>>written with plain XML.
>
>"RDF program" I'm not sure how to interpret this. RDF is a *format* 
>for interpreting triples as a graph (very basically).

Bad choice of words on my part. I simply meant I want to see an 
application in which having the data in RDF format made the 
application development noticeably easier than writing the same 
application with the data presented in plain vanilla XML with a 
namespaces cherry on top would have been.

For example, if I were explaining why XML is superior to binary 
formats, I might say "Here's a Microsoft Word document in a binary 
format. Here's the same docuemnt in WordprocessingML. Now do a 
frequency count of the words in the document. Which format do you 
prefer?" Both are possible. Both formats contain identical 
information; but one format makes the task much easier than the other.

I'd like to see the use cases where starting from an RDF triple store 
makes life easier than starting from the identical information in 
more traditional XML. Use of all easily available free tools and 
languages is allowed (Python, Java, XSLT, XQuery, Owl, etc.) Reliance 
on expensive proprietary systems (e.g. Tamino) is not because as I 
saw on sign somewhere recently, "If we can't afford the solution, 
it's not a solution."
-- 

   Elliotte Rusty Harold
   elharo@m...
   Effective XML (Addison-Wesley, 2003)
   http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/effectivexml
   http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0321150406/ref%3Dnosim/cafeaulaitA

• References:
  • RE: The triples datamodel
    • From: "Joshua Allen" <joshuaa@m...>
  • Meta-somethingorother (was the semantic web mega-permathread thing)
    • From: Michael Champion <mc@x...>
  • Re: Meta-somethingorother (was the semantic web mega-permathreadthing)
    • From: =?UTF-8?B?QmlsbCBkZSBow5NyYQ==?= <bill.dehora@p...>
  • Re: Meta-somethingorother (was the semantic webmega-permathread thing)
    • From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@m...>
  • Re: Meta-somethingorother (was the semantic web mega-permathread thing)
    • From: Bill de hÓra <bill.dehora@p...>
  • Re: Meta-somethingorother (was the semantic webmega-permathread thing)
    • From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@m...>
  • Re: Meta-somethingorother (was the semantic web mega-permathread thing)
    • From: Jonathan Borden <jonathan@o...>

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