Re: a new way of thinking about RDF and RDF Schema

From: Sergey Melnik <melnik@db.stanford.edu>
Subject: Re: a new way of thinking about RDF and RDF Schema
Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2001 15:43:59 -0700

> Peter,
> 
> are you familiar with
> 
> http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Syntax

Yes, I had seen that.
> 
> and 
> 
> http://www-db.stanford.edu/~melnik/rdf/syntax.html
> http://www-db.stanford.edu/~melnik/rdf/fusion.html ?

I hadn't seen these before.  I have seen a proposal by Stephan Decker
(sp?).

> The idea of interpreting arbitrary XML documents semantically is at
> least as old as RDF exists, I think. Unfortunately, quoting Brian on
> this, "there ain't no free lunch". Assigning "meaning" to random XML
> will often produce conterintuitive interpretations, unless the author of
> the document cooperates and uses XML markup judiciously. The above links
> suggest some ways of "adorning" XML documents (even as non-intrusively
> as by simple DTD modifications) so that the corresponding documents have
> well-defined RDF mappings. A reference implementation exists since 1999.
> 
> Sergey

Ahh.  But suppose that you wanted to assign (RDF-ish) meaning to every XML
document?  I haven't seen any schems that can do so.

peter