Re: Instant RDF

<Ora.Lassila@nokia.com> wrote:



> Jonathan Borden wrote:
> >    or in simplified RDF:
> >
> >    <author rdf:about="http://my.theinfo.org/rdf/">
> >        <name>Aaron</name>
> >    </author>
> >
> > so, really what an XSLT rdf 'extractor' would do is to simply
> > transform the "uri" element into an "rdf:about" attribute.
>
> Are you inventing new syntax here as well? If you meant that the XSLT
> "extractor" would generate legal (i.e., current) RDF syntax your example
> does not work: it translates to two triples (an instance of type "author"
> and a property "name" of that instance with value "Aaron").

    Not my invention:

http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Syntax
http://www-db.stanford.edu/~melnik/rdf/syntax.html
http://www-db.stanford.edu/~melnik/rdf/fusion.html

    I should have used the quoted term "Simplified RDF".

    The title and first paragraph of the third document say it all.

    Clearly alot of people are having major problems understanding RDF and
how it might relate to or be useful for interacting with XML.

>
> More generally, I feel that although a simpler, more intuitive syntax
would
> be a good idea, transforming *any* XML to "something like RDF" is somewhat
> dangerous unless you make sure that any intended semantics is preserved.
> Syntactic transformation is only half of the battle...
>

    I guess we are in a Catch-22 situation. On one hand we have arbitrary
XML -- who is to say what the intended semantics are, or the intended number
of triples? On the other hand we have RDF which is supposedly capable of
making semantically meaningful statements about resources such as XML
documents. Yet if  the syntax of RDF is too complicated for simple country
astrophysicists hacking XML to understand, how will these unwashed hordes
produce meaningful XML? XML alone won't create the "semantic web".

    It should be easy for people to add RDF statements into otherwise
mundane XML documents in ways that minimally interfere with the chosen
document structure.

Jonathan Borden
The Open Healthcare Group
http://www.openhealth.org

Received on Thursday, 24 August 2000 17:11:35 UTC