Re: RDF for versioning

I volunteered to come up with a DTD for the history property. I will look at
RDF, and if it seems like a convenient way to express what we want, we should
consider using it, even if we don't advertise it as being RDF compliant. In
other words, there's no reason to invent something new for its own sake. On the
other hand, it is not clear that RDF adds a lot either. Sometimes using a
generic mechanism for meta-data obscures the instance you're trying to capture
and just adds complexity. This isn't the spirit of XML where one is supposed to
be able to define document types that closely correspond to the application
being modeled.





w3c-dist-auth-request@w3.org on 10/05/98 08:38:34 PM
Please respond to w3c-dist-auth-request@w3.org
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Subject: RDF for versioning

At the versioning design team meeting last week, Jim asked
if we wanted to express the revision history (version graph)
in RDF; it's a natural format for it, but there was concern
that we might be tying ourselves to a doomed non-standard--a
few people expressed the opinion that RDF seemed to be dying
on the vine, ignored by the W3C and abandoned by Netscape.
We agreed to come up with a more specific format; I don't
want to reopen that discussion, but I just wanted to let
everybody know that I talked to Ramanathan Guha (Mr. RDF),
and he says it's going to Last Call in a couple of weeks.
(Mind you, I don't know enough about the W3C to know whether
that's a comparable state to the IETF's Last Call.)

--
/====================================================================\
|John (Francis) Stracke    |My opinions are my own.|S/MIME supported |
|Software Retrophrenologist|=========================================|
|Netscape Comm. Corp.      |"And bring the search warrant."          |
|francis@netscape.com      |"You mean the sledgehammer, sir?" "Yes." |
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Received on Tuesday, 6 October 1998 09:36:52 UTC