Re: Quick Guide to Publishing a Thesaurus on the Semantic Web

On Mon, Feb 14, 2005 at 02:19:15PM +0100, Mark van Assem wrote:
> (b) the outcome should be that the thesaurus owners have an intuitive
> feeling of (1) how an RDF version would look like and (2) where to get
> more info on how to do conversion in more detail.
> 
> If that's the case, I think this version satisfies a2 and b1, but some
> more material is needed for b2. For example, it would probably be
> helpful for them to know what technology one can use to convert an XML
> version of a thesaurus to an RDF version (e.g. XSLT). Is a separate
> section on "Conversion" something to consider? Or a reference to another
> (to be created) document?

Mark,

Hmm, it feels to me that the notion of converting between XML
and RDF automatically opens a can of worms.  For starters,
what is an "XML version of a thesaurus"?  Such a document
could presumably take on any number of forms since the document
models expressible in XML are theoretically quite diverse.

Since your posting, Pete Johnston has published a draft
explanation for why XML elements cannot necessarily be used as
RDF properties [1], summarizing a discussion that has recently
come to a head on the dc-architecture list.

My gut feeling is that conversion is something that could be
entrusted to algorithms only if the source XML and the model
expressed thereby already followed well-defined modeling
conventions.  That seems like a risky assumption.

Tom

[1] http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/dcmi/dc-elem-prop/

-- 
Dr. Thomas Baker                        Thomas.Baker@izb.fraunhofer.de
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Received on Friday, 25 February 2005 13:13:22 UTC