- From: Aaron Swartz <aswartz@upclink.com>
- Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2001 10:17:58 -0500
- To: Sergey Melnik <melnik@db.stanford.edu>
- Cc: Brian McBride <bwm@hplb.hpl.hp.com>, rdf core <w3c-rdfcore-wg@w3.org>
On Friday, June 15, 2001, at 08:36 PM, Sergey Melnik wrote:
> The reason
> behind it that currently, given a resource, applications cannot
> determine the namespace of the resource (they can only guess by looking
> for "#" or last "/"). Several people who used the "RDF API" for
> implementing editors for RDF Schemas (including Michael Sintek who
> collaborated on Protege) complained that the API did not offer a way of
> reliably determining the namespace of a resource.
Personally, I don't think namespaces are part of the model and
to add them would really break backwards compatibility. RDF
talks about individual resources, which need not exist in any
"namespace" other than the Web itself. Think of this document:
<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
xmlns="http://rdf.example.org/#">
<rdf:Description>
<foo>bar</foo>
</rdf:Description>
</rdf:RDF>
and
<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
xmlns="http://rdf.example.org/#f">
<rdf:Description>
<oo>bar</oo>
</rdf:Description>
</rdf:RDF>
These documents are currently equivalent, you seem to propose to
change this. In the case of Protoge, namespaces are an
application-specific addition to the model and should remain
that way.
--
[ "Aaron Swartz" ; <mailto:me@aaronsw.com> ; <http://www.aaronsw.com/> ]
Received on Monday, 18 June 2001 12:09:00 UTC