Re: RDFON: a new RDF serialization

On 27 Jul 2007, at 00:27, Garret Wilson wrote:
>
>> Again, I think you misdiagnose the issue. The "Ajax community"  
>> don't ignore RDF because of the syntax. They ignore it because a)  
>> they think it's not needed to solve their problems (overkill)
>
> Well, the huge hack that RDF has become *is* overkill, and half of  
> that overkill is the RDF/XML syntax.

I do agree that it is not helpful, though I would say my feeling is  
that for an xml syntax it nearly gets it right... Not sure what is  
wrong, but there are some very clever things there. Perhaps as more  
people get to understand RDF through N3 or other syntaxes, someone  
will work out how to do RDF/XML right.

> Really the only significant way RDF differs from JSON is 1 ) URIs  
> instead of strings for property names and 2 ) identifiers for  
> object instances. But you wouldn't know it from the current RDF spec.

It does have a well defined semantics, which JSON does not. JSON uses  
the procedural semantics of JavaScript as a crutch, but it is as  
defined just syntax. [1]

As for the literals in N3 timbl made me notice that:

"23"^^xsd:integer .

is very similar to

"23"^xsd:integer .

which is just a shorthand for

[ xsd:integer "23" ] .

so there are not really any trouble for literals, if you think about  
it carefully.


Henry

[1] http://blogs.sun.com/bblfish/entry/the_limitations_of_json

Received on Thursday, 26 July 2007 22:43:30 UTC