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.

Transformation is necessary but transformation need not be expensive.

Consider this analogy. Would the SemanticWeb crash to a halt of French 
and Japanese people use localized names for things? My understanding is 
that it would not. The Semantic Web has built-in support for renaming 
and remapping things (e.g. daml:equivalentTo, daml:subPropertyOf). So 
people can use friendly names AND have 100% interoperability at the same 
time.

Now if the Semantic Web used XSLT as its transformation language then 
there would be some danger that it would become a bottleneck. It is, 
after all, an interpreted Turing-complete language. XSLT is also not 
appropriate because it does not preserve node identity across transforms.

So don't use XSLT. Renaming elements and attributes from RSS to RDF does 
not (IMO) require the power of an infoset-based, random access, 
Turing-complete language.

  http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200201/msg01629.html

  Paul Prescod