RE: Instant RDF

> Personally I am not opposed to a new RDF syntax (the current 
> looks a bit
> like it was "designed by committee" :-). But ultimately the 
> syntax shouldn't matter all that much since I am sure everyone 
> is hoping that most of RDF will be both read and *written* 
> by machines (not humans).

Ora, 

That would be nice :-). 

But one of Aaron's concerns wrt RDF syntax has to do with RSS1.0. Now, while
the development of RSS shouldn't strictly speaking impact on the development
of RDF, RSS has been described as the only mass application of XML to date.
We can expect if RSS1.0 is adopted widely, that a good amount of it will be
handwritten, as is currently the case with RSS.91. On the other hand I don't
see how an RSS1.0 that is difficult to write by hand will be widely adopted.
Some form of compromise needs to be made. And there are some people who will
be happy to see RSS1.0 die.

It would be shame to miss out on the opportunity to piggyback RDF on the
popularity of RSS feeds, that is, to miss piggybacking on a network
amplification effect, on the assumption that there is no pressing need to
adapt the syntax because tools will appear to automate serialization of RDF
anyway. That's not the case for legions of people using RSS now. So at this
point in time, the syntax is perhaps very important: it is after all the
concrete expression of the model and is what people will have to manipulate.


I'm less concerned about the precise syntax (once the model is invariant),
than about missing a golden opportunity to seed RDF. 

-Bill de hÓra

Received on Friday, 25 August 2000 09:57:36 UTC