Re: XML vs. RDF

Bill,

To your point:

> A lot of the counter arguments to these statements come
> down to:
> 	I) if you try to perform semantically-based 
KE/KR/KD
> with XML-only,  
> you will have a lot more code to write & maintain
> YOURSELF - and much  
> of it will reproduce what you'd get automatically using
> RDF++.  	

I would add that not only is a matter of specialized code 
for each schema (or collections of schemas), there is also 
the supporting theoretical work for the schemas' 
specialized reasoner implementations. It's kind of handy 
to know that a reasoner will reach a conclusion after a 
finite amount of time. There is 15 years of work in 
Description Logic to support the algorithms within RDF++ 
reasoners. For example, one knows that OWL DL reasoners, 
e.g., racer, will stop.

Even if some don't care about subsumption (i.e., which 
classes are subclasses of others, and which individuals 
belong to which classes), I would think that everyone 
would care about higher quality. Those who choose XML, 
UML, or Relational DBs (for whatever reason) can benefit 
from creating an ontological representation of their 
information model. This ontology can include defined 
classes representing queries. Automated consistency 
checking of this ontology greatly increases assurance that 
the information model is correct. 

jb

Received on Saturday, 8 July 2006 13:17:12 UTC