Poll: RDF Use Cases

One of the things which struck me lately during one of
our lengthier discussions was the idea that many of our
disagreements may be based on different assumptions
about the applications we have in mind RDF being used 
for.

It might be helpful therefore, to have a list of
canonical use cases so we can say, "well, if you
are trying to do X, then we want ..., but if you
are trying to do Y, then ..."

So what are you're favourite use cases for RDF?

I'll kick off with two:

o Flexible metadata storage.  We have projects
  here with a need to store large amounts of meta
  data, but we can't predict in advance what that
  meta data will be.  The stuff we need to store
  changes over time, and we don't want to go
  updating a database schema each time it does.
  RDF looks good for this.

o Data merging.  My current example of this is
  creating a web page listing the names, email
  addresses, organisational affiliations etc of
  folks on a mailing list.  The mailing list
  server can return an RDF model of the members
  of the list, which in effect just lists their
  email addresses.  This model can be annotated
  by the RDF front end on an LDAP server which
  can add in the other information like phone
  numbers etc.

Brian McBride
HPLabs

Received on Tuesday, 19 December 2000 09:55:03 UTC