Re: RDF/XML Syntax Specification (Revised) W3C Working Draft published

Brian McBride wrote:

> Hi Mike,
> 
> Tarod did capture what I meant rather better than I expressed it, thank 
> you Tarod.  And strictly speaking Peter is correct[mmoran: 1].  Let me take a 
> little more time than I was able to this morning and try to offer you 
> two possible solutions to your problem.
> 
> As I understand it, the key issue is that you have resources with common 
> properties and you want to ensure that you can update a common property 
> just once and all the resources will be 'updated'.

Yes, that is correct. I am also aiming to reduce verbosity.

> The first option one is a variation of Dave Beckett's proposal, which is 
> to represent the common properties in the RDF graph itself
[ ... ]
> Now an application can 'know' that to determine the properties of a 
> resource, as well as listing all the direct properties, it has to list 
> all those linked
[ ... ]
> If this data is only going to be processed by applications you write, 
> this is a possible way to go.  You can write the code which will check 
> for the moran:also property and process it correctly, or you can use an 
> rdf implementation which supports rules.  However, if you send this data 
> to me,  I don't know about and don't implement the special processing of 
> the moran:also property, then information has been lost.
> 
> An alternative solution would be to use XSLT, as you suggested at the 
> beginning of this thread. 
[ ... ]
> we run this through an XSLT processor with some appropriate transform 
> that implements the macro expansion and outputs straight RDF
[ ... ]
> If you do it this way, then any bog standard RDF processor will 
> correctly know that all the common properties apply to each of the 
> resources.  No special processing at their end required; you've done it 
> all up front in the xslt processor.
> 
> I suspect, this latter approach might be best for you.
> 
> Does this help?

Yes, thanks for the breakdown. Right now the XSLT solution looks better, since I
know more about that than RDF (not hard right now :-) ).

What it all seems to boil down to though is that I can't represent that two
resources share some properties in a portable (vanilla RDF) way. I either have to
preprocess my own internal vocabulary into RDF, doing the expansion pre-RDF, or
define some rules to post-process the RDF model to make the inferences I require.


[mmoran: 1]: 
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-interest/2001Dec/0096.html


--
Mike