RE: How will the semantic web emerge

> type systems in computer languages. That may have been the original
> intention but the ability to enforce types is in conflict with the
> requirement that all RDF statements are valid, and the RDF semantics

Right; the part I am concerned about is the consumption patterns,
though.  There is an inherent bias in many development communities to do
the following sorts of things:

1) Look at some RDF; if the rdf:type is present, and the schema/contract
does not match, ignore it or fail fatally.  This is the "postel was
wrong" philosophy that underlies XML (and is appropriate for XML).

2) Look for rdf:type first, and use it as a switch to determine whether
to look for particular predicates.  In other words, type is the first
filter, and things that do not match type fall through the bottom.


I believe both sorts of patterns are appropriate in enterprise
development, certain interop scenarios, and for example XSD, WSDL, etc.
But for semantic web they would be fatal (IMO).

Received on Wednesday, 21 December 2005 17:00:23 UTC