Re: Comments on GRDDL (using 3rd-party XML schemas with GRDDL) [OK?]

On Fri, 2007-07-27 at 09:46 -0500, Dan Connolly wrote:
> It's inconsistent.

Yes

> Any statement of the form "A GRDDL-aware agent may ..." specifies
> conforming behavior. To then say that such behavior is not conforming
> is inconsistent.

Yes, see my previous email about the value of additional text regarding
capabilities not required by a GRDDL-aware agent.  

> Rather than "allowing
> transformations to be found in schemas not specified at 
> the namespace document" it would make more sense to say
> "allowing namespace documents to be looked up using
> non-standard mechanism"; e.g. somebody could use
> a local/custom URN resolver or a catalog or whatever to
> overlay the public web with a local mapping of URIs
> to schemas. 

This makes *much* more sense IMHO.  The mechanism is not out-of-band,
(it is very much within the boundaries of AWWW - albeit via a
non-ubiquitous URI scheme), it doesn't speak specifically about schemas
(of which GRDDL knows *nothing* and should remain this way).  I would
strike out the last statement about schemas.  

I think we can satisfy the XQuery WG's concerns with statements which
demonstrate that HTTP dereference of a namespace URI is not the *only*
way to resolve additional content to consider in calculating a derived
RDF graph (even though this is the only normative mechanism which
results in a 'faithful rendition') without saying anything about XML
schemas.  

This is very similar to something I touched on in a recent presentation
[1] where I investigated how GRDDL can be extended to support "faithful
renditions" via transformations identified by mechanism in a CMS
independent of direct markup in the source.  

The suggested solution was to use "GRDDL-like" mechanisms where the
application of a transformation is the same as in GRDDL, but the means
by which the transformation is identified is outside of GRDDL.  This
does not require a modification to GRDDL but an understanding of how it
can be used as the base framework for additional (in this case, more
specific) behavior.

I think the comment thread is conflating identification of schema
documents with calculation of faithful renditions (the two have
*nothing* to do with each other).

> Then the result is a faithful rendition
> inasmuch as the author of the source document agrees
> that the non-standard lookup mechanism gives a
> reasonable representation of the namespace document.

I'm not certain it would be a 'faithful rendition' as it the resulting
RDF would have been computed through transformations identified in a
manner outside of GRDDL.  However, this doesn't mean that GRDDL-like
computation of RDF graphs are not useful or cannot be done.

[1] http://copia.ogbuji.net/files/stc07/GRDDL-XML-CMS.odp

-- 
Chimezie Ogbuji
Lead Systems Analyst
Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery
Cleveland Clinic Foundation
9500 Euclid Avenue/ W26
Cleveland, Ohio 44195
Office: (216)444-8593
ogbujic@ccf.org


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Received on Wednesday, 1 August 2007 13:45:46 UTC