Re: rdf-concepts comments: this should be a note

On Tue, 5 Nov 2002, Brian McBride wrote:

>
> At 21:57 04/11/2002 -0600, Aaron Swartz wrote:
>
> [...]
>
>
> >I didn't read too carefully; it was rather depressing. I'm rather tempted
> >to restart my work on a competitor to RDF.
>
> I find that really depressing.
>
> The complexification (sic) you refer to.  Is that because RDF is (now)
> complex or is it because we are not explaining it well.
>
> There is not much we can do about the former.  The latter, however, is
> another matter.

Where's the complexity that you see, Aaron? If it's in the
technicalities required to support (hopefully) consistent reasoning,
that's unfortunately one of those "comes with the territory" things.
Actually, the same goes for datatyping, and so on: the more one tries to
express in a language, the richer the idiom has a tendency to become.

A "simple" competitor to RDF might be a rather straightforward
graph-based language - but explanations of how that should be used to
provide rich consistent semantic structures are almost certainly not
going to be.

-- 
jan grant, ILRT, University of Bristol. http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/
Tel +44(0)117 9287088 Fax +44 (0)117 9287112 http://ioctl.org/jan/
Axioms speak louder than words.

Received on Tuesday, 5 November 2002 06:06:33 UTC