Re: GRDDL and OWL/XML

Hi Bijan,

While I disagree with quite a few of your assertions, you clearly feel
strongly about the conclusion (no XSLT) and so your argument deserve
consideration. But unless I misread somewhere, it seems like a key piece is
missing.

Ok, assume for a moment that GRDDL is in place. A GRDDL-aware agent, on
encountering an XML document will follow its nose to the namespace doc,
discover the appropriate XSLT, apply the XSLT and do whatever it's tasked to
do with the resulting RDF.

In effect, to the GRDDL-aware agent the source XML *is* RDF. If you remove
the XSLT from the equation, the GRDDL-aware agent hasn't enough information
to yield the RDF.

My question is, what are you suggesting as an alternative?

While the XML2RDF operation is procedural, all the necessary information is
provided declaratively - in particular, the XSLT is a mapping between two
formats. In principle at least, this could provide the full specification of
any alternate syntax.
A GRDDL-aware agent has prior knowledge of how XSLT mappings can be applied.
Right now, aside from XSLT there aren't (as far as I'm aware) any other
mapping languages or tools spec'd out in such a way to allow the agent to
transparently interpret the source XML as RDF without prior knowledge on the
format - the whole point of GRDDL.

I don't see any reason why the W3C shouldn't host XSLT transformations, they
don't seem that much different than, say, DTDs.

Cheers,
Danny.