RE: XML Schema vs DAML/RDF/RDFS

> I was talking yesterday to a friend whose is working with
> some geologists who want to share data. They are of
> course planning on using xml and are in the process
> of writing up their xml schemas.
>

[...]
>
> So, should they be using rdfs/daml? Why?
>

I had a similar experience last week, although my friends seemed to be
better disposed towards semantic web technology and less committed to XML
Schema.

But I felt that to make a convincing case for the semantic web technologies,
those tehcnologies need to be more than just a (in)convenient language for
exchanging data (XML does that).

The example that came up, was my friend had graphs in his data (call graphs
from a reverse engineering project). He was trying to get the RDF
visualization tools to draw these graphs nicely.

It struck me, that if we had good seemless implementations of DAML+OIL with
RDF then we could add DAML+OIL axioms combining a schema for his call graphs
with the schema for the visualization tools input in such a way that there
could be a clear and clean separation of concerns:

i.e. a picture like:

[  My application ]        [                  ]
[                 ]   ==>  [ application data ]
[                 ]        [                  ]


             [ application schema ]
             [                    ]
             [                    ]

             [ DAML+OIL ontology  ]
             [ linking axioms     ]
             [                    ]

             [tool schema         ]
             [                    ]
             [                    ]


[ generic tool   ]       [            ]
[ e.g. graph viz ]  <=== [ tool input ]
[                ]       [            ]


With appropriate tools and implementatations it should just be "shake 'n'
bake".

I still think we've a way to go as a community before we can evangelise
effectively.

Jeremy

Received on Thursday, 18 April 2002 05:00:17 UTC