Re: Proposal: "Canonical" RDF/XML

On Sun, 29 Jun 2003, Benja Fallenstein wrote:

>
>Hi Charles,
>
>Charles McCathieNevile wrote:
>> One of the benefits of the XML syntax should be that many things can be done
>> with RDF without having to have a full RDF framework - there are a lot of XML
>> tools and development that could be applied to information if a canonical
>> syntax was available.
>>
>> On the other hand, rather than suggesting there is a single caonical
>> approach, I thin what is useful is a simple mechanism for saying how to turn
>> given RDF into a particular XML schema for processing the bits that are
>> understood.
>
>So, this is the issue of converting RDF to domain-specific XML (the
>converter needs to be specific to a given RDF vocabulary for this).

No, the cnverter needs to be for a specific resulting XML vocabulary (and it
should be aware of whether you expect it to do RDF Schema based inferencing,
OWL-based inferencing, etc)

>All well and good, but I don't think it's exactly related to my problem.
>:-) Which is: diffing/merging/version controlling arbitrary RDF data. --

I think that your problem is similar to what I would like to do - being
able to control arbitrary RDF data with tools completely ignorant of RDF and
only able to handle basic XML schemata. (I don't go as far as wanting to work
with arbitrarily formatted text - I am prepared to move past grep in order to
meet RDF data halfway :)

>The first application for this is that my working group wants to
>maintain a TODO list/calendar/schedule/note board/etc. as an RDF graph
>in our CVS repository. We want to be able to mix many different
>vocabularies there.
>
>I think that your approach doesn't apply there... :)

I think it does. You keep RDF data, with whatever mixed vocabs and so on you
have, in a document. But when you want to work with it you have an interface
that gives a canonical form - an for different tasks you maight have
different forms.

My use case is as follows:

I collect data mixing foaf information about who knows who, what they are
interested in and working on with information about what languages they
speak, stuff about where they are when, (both in generic location and in
terms of attending events), what they look like, and perhaps a few other
things.

If I can have a simple expression of who knows whom, extracted from my data
and strait-jaceketed into an XML schema I could process that with an Xform,
and then drop the resultng stuff back into the RDF data collection. If I want
to put information about who is in a particular picture, and what event it
was taken at, I would like to use a different XML canonical form suited to
that task - that is what I was promisde XML would do for me. What RDF does
for me is let me mix thesee things easily, and if I use RDF-aware tools I can
easily add new things anywhere - for example I might add some new information
directly to the RDF I have using RDF Author.

cheers

Chaals

Received on Sunday, 29 June 2003 10:42:45 UTC