- From: Danny Ayers <danny.ayers@gmail.com>
- Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 14:17:03 +0100
- To: "tim.glover@bt.com" <tim.glover@bt.com>
- Cc: love26@gorge.net, iand@internetalchemy.org, hhalpin@ibiblio.org, semantic-web@w3.org
On 3/13/06, tim.glover@bt.com <tim.glover@bt.com> wrote: > > > But syntax does matter. For example, I am told that Newton's formulation > of calculus was impenetrable, and progress in physics owes a lot to the > alternative syntax by Leibnitz. And compare doing arithmetic using Roman > Numerals with positional notation. To play the Devil's Advocate, I'd point out that the intended purpose of the each notation differs, that suitability for the task needs to be considered. I'm sure you're right about the impenetrability of Newton's syntax (he was an alchemist after all), but I'm not sure either syntax is much good for the command line. The Wikipedia tells me that Roman numerals "appear to derive from notches on tally sticks, such as those used by Italian and Dalmatian shepherds into the 19th century". I imagine the shepherds would have had problems with positional notation, having to whittle the stick afresh for every new sheep. Baa. > Pragmatically, if RDF has a future it WILL be given a simple syntax - de > facto and by practitioners, in the face of howls from the W3C if > necessary! I don't disagree, and the simpler syntax of Turtle does seem pretty good for human-legibility. But for machine comms it's a different matter. There are issues with RDF/XML in this context, notably the impedance mismatch to most XML tools. But this is something which would be the case to a greater or lesser extent whatever the syntax looked like because graphs > trees. RDF/XML is fine between RDF systems, and interfacing with the XML and HTML worlds is possible (especially when SPARQL is available). Also RDF/XML isn't bad as a read-only language for debugging purposes (compare with SOAP). So, trying to speak pragmatically, my tendency would be to encourage Turtle (especially around education/outreach) but accepting that RDF/XML (or domain-specific XML where appropriate) will be there on the wire. I suspect human resources would more effectively be used in building stuff than trying to standardize on a different XML serialization. (I'd place things like GRDDLable XML and Embedded RDF in a different bag, time will tell what role they might play in RDFmachine-RDFmachine comms). Cheers, Danny. -- http://dannyayers.com
Received on Monday, 13 March 2006 13:17:11 UTC