Re: hiding RDF (was: Re: RDF Triples in XML, named graphs)

On Feb 11, 2004, at 7:01 PM, Jeremy Carroll wrote:
>
>> anyhow - while playing here with some pilot projects and trying to 
>> sell RDF based solutions to real customers we found very hard selling 
>> the XML "bits" of RDF, unless we have a good/smart/clever way to 
>> "hide it" behind some more familiar XML shell. Your paper (and 
>> others) seems touching this issue at different levels - but we have 
>> to admit that we still have problems  convincing customers to buy RDF 
>> "specific" syntaxes like your TriX - while using them, users are 
>> generally scared away - unless it resembles something more familiar 
>> to simple "what-you-see-is-what-you-mean" well-formed XML.
>> a part RPV - have you (or other people on this list) ever gave a 
>> closer look to more XML "friendly" (or lightweight) approaches to RDF 
>> like the xemantics TAP approach?
>
> The xslt approach is meant to allow *any* XML syntax and then 
> transform it into RDF - i.e. for a specific customer you give them 
> exactly what they want.

yes indeed and it is very much clear why a solution like TriX would 
allow such transformation things, which traditional RDF/XML would not - 
XSLTs can then be written and RDF be "de-normalized" into other human 
friendly or readable XML formats - even though "canonical" syntaxes 
like 'RDF/XML' already generated by Jena (and others) are doing already 
a fine job by grouping statements by subject, expanding bNodes and so 
on.

but the real point here is how much work a user/programmer has to put 
into writing and managing RDF descriptions - even though RDF is 
supposed to be for machines, the poor users will have most of time 
mark-up their data into their templates of scripts, JSP, ASP and so on. 
TriX is definitively a step ahead compared to RDF/XML - added DTD, 
XMLSchema (then kinda "deterministic" markup) and named graphs are very 
cool - but still too complicated for the average human being to use, 
due he/she has to think in terms of statements, subjects, predicates, 
objects, collections, reification and so on. Definitively, such an 
"assembly like language" is very good for general purpose RDF toolkits 
and frameworks, and more experienced users. But the major part of XML 
folks out there do not have a clue (or few) why they have to 
"denormalize" their data all the time into RDF constructs. They keep on 
asking themselves: "why the syntax does do that for me?" - what we 
think is needed are some more "vertical" profiles of the XML syntax for 
RDF - easier to write but as powerful and expressive as TriX or 
traditional RDF/XML - and that's why solutions like XIOR/xemantics 
seems more attractive from an XML point of view.

cheers

Alberto

>
>
>> http://tap.stanford.edu/xemantics.html
>> at first sight it looks quite what an XML user would love to see or 
>> use :)
>
>
> I have not looked at that.
>
>
> Jeremy
>
>

Received on Thursday, 12 February 2004 07:35:07 UTC