Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: RDFStyles: alternative to XSLT for RDF

couple of points:

* XSLT can be used to manipulate different kinds of XML structures, as
TreeHugger shows. You could use something other than XPath to point into
a data structure and then XSLT to process the parts you are interested
in.

* XSLT need not be used with documents. I see no technical problem with,
say, translating RDFPath queries to an RDF query language and using it to
query some other data source such as an SQL store.

Whether either of these are good ideas however, I don't know. It might
be less confusing to create an RDF-specific tool. But it seems a shame
to duplicate what's already there and being heavily used.

Libby

On Wed, 22 Oct 2003, Dmitry Borodaenko wrote:

>
> On Tue, Oct 21, 2003 at 08:27:28PM +0100, Graham Klyne wrote:
> > RDF and XSLT are tuned to different kinds of problem space.  XSLT's is
> > manipulation of tree-structured data.  RDF's is handling information
> > that originates in a variety of structural forms, and which is not
> > closed to the addition of new information relating to any existing
> > component.
>
> One more aspect of RDF that I notice is often forgotten is that it's
> supposed to be distributed (see more below).
>
> > To say that an incompatibility is the fault of either one or the other
> > is to ignore the most important factor:  what problem are you trying
> > to solve?
> >
> > The "root cause" of any problem here is a mismatch between the problem
> > to be solved and the tool that is brought to bear on it.  If you have
> > problems trying to use a screwdriver to drive nails, is it a fault in
> > the screwdriver?  I think not.
>
> You've really driven the nail home with this argument ;)
>
> My favorite screw in need for screwdriver is RDF query (as opposed to
> RDF transformation): since RDF is really distributed, you are not
> supposed to be able to process the whole problem domain in-memory and on
> a single host, you're rather supposed to _query_ different remote
> knowledge bases and process _results_ of these queries.
>
> Fetching whole of WordNet, Wikipedia, and DMoz and running an XSLT
> transform on the combined result doesn't fit into the original vision of
> Semantic Web as I understand it.
>
> --
> Dmitry Borodaenko
>
>
>

Received on Wednesday, 22 October 2003 10:38:06 UTC