Re: Semantic Web Languages

On 3/31/06, John F. Sowa <sowa@bestweb.net> wrote:
> Danny,
>
> I don't violently disagree with anything you said, but I
> do have some quibbles and a couple of extra points:
>
>  > One of my dayjob contracts requires a kind of validation
>  > outside of RDF/OWL, this I'm implementing using custom
>  > (mostly hard-coded) logic on top of the RDF/OWL representation.
>  > ... Throughout this work I'm mixing and matching numerous
>  > RDFS vocabularies/OWL ontologies as demanded by the domain.
>
> I realize that many people have been doing useful work with RDF
> and OWL, and since nothing better is widely available, people
> have to live with what they've been given.  But I believe that
> anything that has been done with RDF could have been done sooner,
> better, and with much greater efficiency with an XML tag that
> says LANG=TupleList followed by an enclosed list of tuples in
> the form (and with the option of n-ary tuples as well):
>
>     (R1 a b) (R2 c d) (R3 e f) (R4 g h) ...

Perhaps. Arguably the promotion of RDF/XML as the standard interchange
syntax did more harm than good by alienating a lot of XML people (and
obfuscating the model for non-XML people). Personally I'm not
convinced one way of the other, but Tim Bray's opinion isn't rare:
"The XML serialization of RDF is horrible; it's a botched job."

> I agree that taste is hard to quantify, but when the designer
> of a language apologizes for his mistakes, that should be a
> serious warning sign:
>
>     http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/05/21/RDFNet

See also an apparent shift of position:
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2005/10/03/Scoble-on-Search

btw, re. Tim's challenge:
"I've offered the world the RDF.net challenge, which is that for
anybody who can build an actual RDF-based application that I want to
use more than once or twice a week, I'll give them RDF.net. I
announced that in May 2003, and nothing has come close."

The Firefox browser has RDF in its core, I'm pretty sure I've seen Tim
say he uses it. But "RDF-based application" is rather loose. If
Firefox RDF-based or HTML and HTTP-based?


> But you can get just as much web friendliness and just as much
> or more modularity with XML tags that say LANG=xxx.

I don't disagree. But now we have RDF/XML in a specification. The main
criticisms have been human-illegibility and poor compatibility with
XML tools. But the SPARQL XML results format largely covers the
former, Turtle covers the latter. Virtually all RDF tools support
RDF/XML reading and writing, which covers the primary use of the
stuff, interchange between RDF systems.

As Unix has
> demonstrated, it is possible to have an extremely modular system
> that supports any kind of language or any kind of GUI anyone might
> want -- without enforcing any constraints on syntax.

I (violently) agree :-)

Cheers,
Danny.


--

http://dannyayers.com

Received on Monday, 3 April 2006 10:51:40 UTC