RE: RDF and XLink

Ron, this is a fantastic effort; thanks.  I have some editorial comments 
that I'll write up when I have some real time, but for now, here are some 
reactions to the technical aspects:

- Do we need to cover linkbase lists (which have now shrunk down to a 
special arcrole) explicitly?  Or will the mechanism for harvesting 
statements out of arcroles suffice?

- In some cases, you've proposed XLink properties (xlink:label, 
xlink:title, and so on).  Do we need a complete set for all XLink-related 
semantics?  Can they be "virtual" (that is, without an actual resource that 
can be retrieved), or do we need to supply some resource -- perhaps an 
XLink RDF schema?

- I'm not familiar with the RDF practice of constructing a predicate out of 
an element type.  (I should read up on it, but need to catch a plane 
soon...)  Is it "safe"?  E.g., if the element type is just an NCName, does 
it still work?  Has this method been generally received well?

- I'm not sure it's a good idea to provide a description of how to 
synthesize a canonical XPointer.  Can we get away with not doing this?  At 
the least, I wouldn't want it to be a "must."  What is the "special 
handling of title elements" relative to synthesizing XPointers?

- I think that the whole title element, not just its contents, should be 
the object of an RDF statement.  There might be important attributes on the 
element, such as xml:lang, that help you decide how to handle it.

- I do think behavior attributes should be handled along with everything 
else.  But why not associate them with the arc, instead of the ending 
resource as you suggest?  They're a property of traversal, not of one 
resource or the other.

- If there's any reason at all to make the harvested statements a Set 
instead of a Bag, we'd have to define a canonical harvesting order, yes?

         Eve

At 10:29 AM 5/13/00 -0700, Ron Daniel wrote:
>I think that a lot of the issues in making a mapping
>from XLinks to RDF statements have been covered in
>various messages on and off various lists. Rather than
>recapitulate those discussions, I think the fastest way
>to get to adding an Appendix to the XLink spec is to
>draft one and have people start to critique it.
>
>So, here's a first draft. People should feel free to
>critique it, you are not going to hurt my feelings.
>
>Ron

--
Eve Maler                                    +1 781 442 3190
Sun Microsystems XML Technology Center    elm @ east.sun.com

Received on Thursday, 18 May 2000 11:49:55 UTC