RE: Issue rdfms-abouteach

On Fri, 16 Nov 2001 Patrick.Stickler@nokia.com wrote:

> > I would prefer working at the RDF level; use concepts such as
> > relationships between URI-labelled terms.
>
> You are free to work with RDF at whatever level you prefer,
> but there are lots of other folks who will approach RDF and
> interact with RDF *solely* by means of the XML serialization.
>
> That may not be optimal. That may not be what was originally
> envisioned. But that's the reality.
>
> > If you want to refer to
> > things in other documents, use rdfs:seeAlso.
>
> You can't be serious... The utility of rdfs:seeAlso for
> machine understandable cross referencing and the
> syndication of distributed knowledge is nearly zilch.

I disagree, having used rdfs:seeAlso to guide an RDF indexing robot around
a Web of RDF/XML files, I find it works pretty well, even without using
sub-property specialization (a technique the RDFS spec explicitly
mentions).

For example, see http://rdfweb.org/people/danbri/rdfweb/danbri-foaf.rdf
where I use it as an annotation on partially described resources
(typically people). (please ignore the genid: stuff in that file, it was a
hack to work around my buggy blank-node code).


> Have you ever tried it? And if so, how many lines of code
> were devoted to intrepretations and presumptions that were
> not explicit in the semantics of rdfs:seeAlso?  And what
> about rdfs:seeAlso references to unsupported encodings,
> or worse yet, supported encodings not intended to be actually
> interpreted as assertions!
>
> Sorry, no go.

It go for me. If I wanted to be fancy, my robot would use content
negotiation to request its favoured encodings of the see-also'd URI. In
practice, everyone's used RDF/XML so that wasn't an issue. Pointing to
non-asserted content isn't a problem for rdfs:seeAlso, but one for the
document formats (eg. XHTML, SVG) and protocols (HTTP/1.1, SOAP etc) that
expose such content in the Web.

Dan


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Received on Friday, 16 November 2001 08:40:18 UTC