Re: Comments on GRDDL (using 3rd-party XML schemas with GRDDL) [OK?]

On Fri, 2007-07-27 at 14:22 -0400, Jonathan Robie wrote:
[...]
> > No; only that if the author didn't point directly nor
> > indirectly to the transformation, we don't know whether
> > it's a faithful rendition or not.
> 
> I'm not sure I've grasped the concept of faithful renditions.
> 
> I assume that most document authors have no idea what GRDDL 
> transformations may be tucked away in a schema or other document 
> associated with a namespace, and would be unlikely to read the code to 
> determine what inferences may be generated. Do you assume otherwise? If 
> not, in what sense are these transformations said to mirror the author's 
> intent?

If you write an XML document using namespace XYZ, then you
agree to whatever the XYZ namespace document says about your
document; just like if you write a document in HTML, you
agree to whatever the HTML spec says about your document.
If the XYZ namespace document says your document
includes some RDF data, then by putting that XYZ namespace
declaration at the top, you agree that it does.

>  Is it not primarily the document per se that best reflects the 
> intent of the author, since that's the only thing we know the author 
> actually looked at?

Right; a namespace declaration on the root element is part
of the document.

> I assume that may different parties might license different sets of 
> valid inferences from a given schema or document. What determines which 
> of these inferences are "faithful renditions"?

That's a complex question that the GRDDL spec doesn't claim to answer.

The GRDDL spec just says that if you use GRDDL markup to link
to a transformation directly, you claim that the result is
a faithful rendition of what you meant; and likewise, if you
link to a transformation from a namespace document, you claim
that the results are a faithful rendition for all documents
written using that namespace.

I'm just paraphrasing the spec here:

[[
By specifying a GRDDL transformation, the author of a document states
that the transformation will provide a faithful rendition in RDF of
information (or some portion of the information) expressed through the
XML dialect used in the source document.

Likewise, by specifying a GRDDL namespace transformation or profile
transformation, the creator of that namespace or profile states that the
transformation will provide a faithful RDF rendition of a class of
source documents which relate to that namespace or profile.
]]

http://www.w3.org/TR/grddl/#sec_rend



>  I understand the 
> mechanics of how these transformations are found, but I'm trying to 
> understand the user model.
> 
> Jonathan
-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/

Received on Friday, 27 July 2007 19:32:47 UTC