Re: Difference between RDF/XML and RDF/XML-ABBREV

On 4/12/06, Michael Schneider <m_schnei@gmx.de> wrote:

> I have learned the XML serialization of RDF a few months ago, which is
> called RDF/XML. Now I found out that there is another serialization,
> which is called RDF/XML-ABBREV. I did not find anything about it in the
> official W3C documents. Can anybody tell me the difference between both
> serializations and if this is an offical standard?

There are a lot of different ways a particular set of data could be
expressed in RDF/XML, which means different stylistic variants are
possible. RDF/XML-ABBREV is one such. As far as I'm aware it's more of
an informal convention, not something likely to formalised into a
standard.

The Primer [1] discusses the abbreviated style, it reduces the
longhand URIs and tends towards "striping" [2] the XML making it
generally easier for human reading/writing. It's also convenient if
you want to make an existing XML format RDF-friendly [3].

Another style is to flatten everything into a series individual
rdf:Description blocks, each only containing a single statement.
Visually unappealing, but easy to create and can be convenient for
debugging.

There another problem with having different ways of saying the same
thing in RDF/XML, it makes it much harder to process using regular XML
tools. Morten Frederiksen's done a style, R3X [4],  designed to work
well with XSLT etc - I'm willing to bet there are other variations on
this theme.

(Pretty much any XML can be translated into RDF/XML with XSLT if
appropriate vocabularies are available, and SPARQL offers a very
flexible way of outputing whatever XML you like by slinging its XML
results format through XSLT).

But the bottom line is that all these variants are RDF/XML, and any
RDF/XML parser should be able to understand them all. They're only
syntactical, it makes no difference to the underlying model. For a bit
of history on how RDF/XML got the way it is, see [5].

Cheers,
Danny.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-primer/#newresources
[2] http://www.w3.org/2001/10/stripes/
[3] http://www.xml.com/lpt/a/2002/10/30/rdf-friendly.html
[4] http://www.wasab.dk/morten/blog/archives/2004/05/30/transforming-rdfxml-with-xslt
[5] http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/200407/swintro/syntaxdesign.html

--

http://dannyayers.com

Received on Wednesday, 12 April 2006 11:35:15 UTC