Re: Review of Relevant Technologies section

On 7 July 2011 15:28, Jon Phipps <jphipps@madcreek.com> wrote:
>> ...RDF is so closely matching the principles of linked data (data about
>> things expressed using links) that it will be probably difficult to find
>> something radically different.
>>
>> Antoine
>
> I'm concerned that this is one area where the report draws an unsupportable
> conclusion.
> It's not the purpose of an XG group, as I understand it at least, to draw this kind of conclusion.
> For instance I personally think that it's an open question, worthy of serious investigation, of whether marc21 can be distributed as linked data in more or less its current form.

RDF is to linked data, as HTML is to the classic Web. HTML isn't the
only document format in the Web (PDFs, JPEGs, Flash, text, ...), but
it *is* the glue that joins it all together. RDF, with a bit of care
and modesty, can play the same role for data.

There are lots of domain specific data formats out there, and while it
is possible to RDFize them to some extent, so that contents can be
merged and mixed more freely, ... those formats aren't going away. So
geographic markups, or media formats with embedded metadata, ... or
specific file formats e.g. scientific software, or 3D modelling, ...
RDF's contribution there is as much for a metadata as for a data role.
We use RDF to say what the file is, where it came from, and a bit of
what's in it. But that doesn't mean the original data file is to be
thrown away.

I suspect much the same goes for MARC. In some cases marc21 data will
be shared directly in the Web. But quite likely it will be shared in a
Web of data where much of the interconnectivity is handled by RDF
documents. Put this way, we don't have any big conflict. RDF gives a
general descriptive framework, but some of the data files it describes
will also be themselves accessible in the Web for specialist
processing (geo, 3d, media, ... and sure why not books? or sql dumps?
or apache log files...?). Sure the contents of that data can be turned
into triples, but sometimes that's not the most practical thing to do.

cheers,

Dan

Received on Thursday, 7 July 2011 14:28:30 UTC