Re: Why RDF? was: ISSUE-160: Allowing collections in semantic relationships

Leonard, Ed,

>> But if it is just for publication and exchange, why bother putting it into
>> an RDF framework? There are various simpler formats that have been used in
>> the past for the exchange of thesaurus data. I thought that the point of RDF
>> was to make it amenable to machine reasoning.
> 
>>From my perspective the really powerful thing that SKOS provides as a
> semantic web application are web identifiers (URIs) for concepts.
> 
> Minting URIs for your concept schemes and concepts allows them to be
> referenced and resolved easily. This allows descriptions of resources
> to unambiguously use SKOS concepts, while also providing a means for
> mapping concepts from different concept schemes together.

And I'd add a graph, [1] at [2]: this is the kind of thing that is more difficult to do without RDF.
As a matter of fact the only two linked-data SKOS examples I know of, [3] and [4], are already connected (ok, partially, but that shows the direction to go!).

And further RDF is not about reasoning. That's more RDFS and OWL. And even then, reasoning based on incomplete semantic specification can still prove useful...

Antoine


[1] http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bizer/pub/lod-datasets_2008-09-18.html
[2] http://esw.w3.org/topic/SweoIG/TaskForces/CommunityProjects/LinkingOpenData
[3] http://lcsh.info
[4] http://libris.kb.se

Received on Tuesday, 16 December 2008 17:17:17 UTC