Re: RDF 2 Wishlist

Sandro Hawke wrote:
> So, what should W3C standardize next in the area of RDF, if anything?

Two suggestions:

- RDF templates

What I think RDF could benefit from a lot is a templating language like 
XSLT (‘RDF-T’?). A standardised means to transform data from an RDF 
source to XML and (X)HTML would be very useful I think, a very common 
use case, and right now there isn’t really anything to do that. This 
could be something based on XSLT with a RDF replacement for XPath 
(RPath?), you could even mix RDF with XML data sources. XSLT is a nice 
functional language, has good mindshare, and a lot of standardising work 
already done.

Or it could be something new, maybe . I myself made some (very simple) 
RDF templating thing a couple of years ago, loosely based on the RDF 
templating in Mozilla’s code base, I attached an example. It contains 4 
different templates, which loop over a set of nodes provided to it.

- RDF vocabulary exchange / retrieval (/ signing?)

Something else that might be good to have, re. the “link rot is (not) 
dangerous” discussion that was held earlier, is some vocabulary exchange 
and retrieval format. The argument in that discussion was that RDF has a 
strong follow-your-nose approach, so when a vocabulary URL stops working 
it can have a strong impact on all its users, as vocabularies can carry 
constraints that are semantically significant to the data.

Now of course this is no deal-breaker, you could source the vocabulary 
from copies cached elsewhere, however there is no standard support for 
such distribution and retrieval of vocabularies from repositories. Not 
sure if this is something that needs to be standardised, but maybe there 
should be something.

~Laurens

-- 
~~ Ushiko-san! Kimi wa doushite, Ushiko-san nan da!! ~~
Laurens Holst, developer, Utrecht, the Netherlands
Website: www.grauw.nl. Backbase employee; www.backbase.com