WG: RDF / XML Interoperability

Dear group,

and here is the second input so far.

Best
Christian

Von: Reul, Quentin
Gesendet: Freitag, 10. Juni 2016 15:36
An: Dirschl, Christian <Christian.Dirschl@wolterskluwer.com>
Cc: philr@vistatec.ie
Betreff: RDF / XML Interoperability

Hi Christian,

One of the main issues that we have encountered in leveraging RDF and XML technologies relates to transformation between one format to the other. Although the RDF standard includes the RDF/XML syntax, a graph in RDF can be rendered in many different ways in XML. For instance, the <rdf:Description> element can be used to represent a resource or its type (e.g. skos:Concept) can be used. This is because the RDF/XML syntax is schemaless. As such, transformation between RDF and XML using XSLTs is not optimal and XSLTs need to be tailored to different flavor of RDF/XML (which is costly). One solution that we have used is to transform the RDF input (in any supported syntax) to be converted into a XML canonical form prior to applying XSLTs. The approach is supplemented by a library of Java functions that can be called from XSLTs to process the graph. This approach has enabled us to migrate data across systems in several projects. However, we have seen issues with the performance of transformation as well as increase in complexity. In other words, it is difficult to maintain as requirements for transformation change.

In terms of interoperability, I think that XML is great for representing content, whereas RDF is great for representing meta-information (e.g. title, date, etc.) about the content. The main aspect is to assign URIs to the abstract content and there physical encoding (e.g. XML format). A few standards (e.g. RDFa) have already been defined to integrate meta-information in HTML. Note that the Interchange XML format uses the attributes defined in the RDFa specification to include meta-information.

I am looking forward to contributing to the new community group.

Kind regards,

Quentin Reul, PhD
Lead IT Architect | Global Platform Organization | +1 (917) 891 5490
Email: Quentin.Reul@wolterskluwer.com<mailto:Quentin.Reul@wolterskluwer.com>
Skype: quentin_reul
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/quentinreul