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RE: Meta-somethingorother (was the semantic web mega-permathre
- To: "Jonathan Borden" <jonathan@o...>,"XML Developers List" <xml-dev@l...>
- Subject: RE: Meta-somethingorother (was the semantic web mega-permathread thing)
- From: "Michael Rys" <mrys@m...>
- Date: Thu, 10 Jun 2004 01:00:16 -0700
- Thread-index: AcROhuOaE6fsO5NPS1SxuzuvEnlzOwAOU3Pw
- Thread-topic: Meta-somethingorother (was the semantic web mega-permathread thing)
Once somebody shows me a description logic
inference engine that actually scales, I will become more interested in this
aspect.
The one advantage RDF as any extended
entity relationship model has over tree models like XML, is the ability to
represent relationship graphs. However, for that, there is a very well suited
tuple based model: the relational model. Having more semantics associated with
the relationships is useful, but only as long as the relationships are built-in.
Best regards
Michael (who in his former live
implemented a hybrid database/description logic system)
From: Jonathan Borden
[mailto:jonathan@o...]
Sent: Wednesday, June 09, 2004
6:02 PM
To: XML Developers List
Subject: RE:
Meta-somethingorother (was the semantic web mega-permathread thing)
From: Jonathan
Borden <jonathan@o...>
Date: June
9, 2004 8:41:34 PM EDT
To: "Dare
Obasanjo" <dareo@m...>
Subject: Re:
Meta-somethingorother (was the semantic web mega-permathread thing)
-----Original Message-----
From: Bill de hÓra [mailto:bill.dehora@p...]
Sent: Wednesday, June 09, 2004 2:58 PM
Subject: Re: Meta-somethingorother (was the
semantic web mega-permathread thing)
I suggest making an informed decison - read the RDF or OWL
Model Theory and decide for yourself whether
XML+Namespaces+HTTP cover it off - if you come back and say
yes, then we'll have something to talk about.
I've read a little RDF & OWL model theory and have failed to see
what they buy me above and beyond basing my applications on
XML/XPath/XSLT/XSD/XQuery. RDF people like pretending that the XML family of
technologies ends with the XML 1.0 spec when this is far from the truth.
One difference, but clearly not the only difference, is that the OWL DL
subset allows you to use description logic inferencing engines with
"knowledge bases" (i.e. a collection of triples) that conforms to OWL
DL. Perhaps this doesn't float your boat, but this is *one* example of
something that you can do using OWL that XML/XPath/XSLT/XSD/XQuery doesn't
allow you to *directly* do. The reason that I say *directly* is that one can
also quite easily come up with an XML format that is OWL DL compatible (e.g. the
OWL *XML* presentation syntax).
I suppose for fun you might write a DL inferencing engine in XSLT.
Perhaps that could be a new test that Microsoft can give interviewees :-)
I also find it interesting that almost every RDF booster talks about
how the benefit of RDF is that you can dump all this wonderful semantic data in
an RDF store and then query it.
So where exactly are these RDF stores or standard RDF query languages?
I can dump XML data into a relational database today and query it with SQL. I
even could dump it in an XML database [or relational database with an XML
datatype] and query it with XQuery or XPath.
What exactly do RDF technologies buy me over using XML technologies for
doing queries over FOAF + RSS 1.0 data, for instance.
Nothing in that instance. For less trivial examples you can do quite
alot in SQL (or XQuery, or even XSLT) with the use of procedures.
The particular value of OWL/RDF is that the model theory licenses a
well defined set of inferences given any particular set of triples in the same
fashion that SQL defines a set of result tuples based on a set of tables and a
given SQL statement.
OWL is great for expressing classifications of things where one is not
concerned about whether the "thing" is an attribute or element (in
that specific case one can use XSD for example) but where things might be
taxonomies of birds, or bacteria or chemotherapy agents, or genes or chemicals
or diseases or books or ... anything that you might want to classify. When you make
assertions about categories the "system" understand that you are
making such assertions about each instance of each of the category's
subcategories.
If you aren't that interested in classifying things, then OWL probably
isn't that useful to you. (Either that, or you haven't learned about the cool
things that you can do when things are classified (assuming that you consider
doing stuff like medical diagnosis cool)).
PS: Then there's the fact that RDF doesn't deal that well with mixed
content.
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