Re: Transforming XML content into RDF assertions

Murray Spork wrote:

> OTOH - in the case of RSS I wonder about issues like scalability if they 
> drop RDF as the representation syntax - an RDF tool wishing too (for 
> example) aggregate and reason over maybe hundreds of different 
> news-feeds may find the transformation process is too great a bottle 
> neck to allow for reasoning on the fly.

IMHO the bottleneck is not in the transformation; this can be done in 
many ways (XSLT, SAX, put your stuff here) or it may not happen at all. 
The problems are in the complexity of such a transformation result or 
the actual XML. Almost any XML can be interpreted as RDF but some of the 
challenges are:

  * The amound of unneeded information and the proccess of filtering 
this out of the transformation result.

  * The result RDF can only be considered as a temporary graph that 
cannot really be merged with others, unless there is a way to avoid 
inconsistency between resource identifiers (which may be different for 
the same resource in different transformations).

If the XML has been designed with RDF in mind (avoiding meaningless 
containers and using URIs or IDs to identify what RDF sees as subjects) 
then the problem is much easier to solve.

Personally, when designing XML schemas for clients, I find it much 
easier to use something close the RDF model than a fancy XML one with 
sections in the document grouping statements etc. The result is simple 
and predictable while code designed for it can be highly reusable.

Just my quarter of a euro.

Manos

Received on Friday, 4 October 2002 04:11:35 UTC