- From: Rinke Hoekstra <hoekstra@uva.nl>
- Date: Fri, 9 May 2008 11:06:17 +0200
- To: "Michael Schneider" <schneid@fzi.de>
- Cc: "Ivan Herman" <ivan@w3.org>, "OWL Working Group WG" <public-owl-wg@w3.org>
Hi Michael, On 9 mei 2008, at 10:46, Michael Schneider wrote: > > Ok, then I will put a deliberately provocative question: > What *is* GRDDL actually? A standard way to indicate that there exists some transformation from (essential information encoded in) the source XML format to RDF. In a round-about way it is a means to express arbitrary RDF in XML. > I can define an XSLT between two XML formats, anyway. > Is GRDDL more than just a hint to people that they can > use XSLT to transform arbitrary XML to *RDF/XML* in particular? Yes, GRDDL does not require you to use XSLT, it can be a web service as well (cf. Bijan's remark on the telecon). But to answer the gist of your question: in principle yes, because GRDDL allows you to specify multiple transformations that each extract different information from the XML. It's about 'gleaning' not translation. I.e. given a particular XML file, give me the particular RDF triples encoded in this XML that I can understand. > Or putting it differently: What would be missing, > if GRDDL wouldn't exist, given that there is already XSLT? 1) Because the application of an XSLT transformation is not guaranteed to produce RDF 2) Because GRDDL allows transformations other than those expressed in XSLT (XSLT is not a very powerful language) > Or putting it even more differently: What would be wrong with > just defining *some* XSLT from OWL/XML to RDF/XML, > simply forgetting about the *word* "GRDDL"? Because that's not what we're after... or maybe: that's exactly the issue we have been debating. A requirement most (if not all) WG members share is that *if* we have an OWL/XML format it should be translateable to RDF/XML (or RDF) in a standard way. We need some way to point to this official transformation: this is what GRDDL standardises, and allows us to do. 'Just' a pointer to an XSLT does not do the same thing. Cheers, Rinke ----------------------------------------------- Drs. Rinke Hoekstra Email: hoekstra@uva.nl Skype: rinkehoekstra Phone: +31-20-5253499 Fax: +31-20-5253495 Web: http://www.leibnizcenter.org/users/rinke Leibniz Center for Law, Faculty of Law University of Amsterdam, PO Box 1030 1000 BA Amsterdam, The Netherlands -----------------------------------------------
Received on Friday, 9 May 2008 09:07:03 UTC