- From: Sean B. Palmer <sean@mysterylights.com>
- Date: Mon, 27 Nov 2000 21:54:53 -0000
- To: "Leonard R. Kasday" <kasday@acm.org>
- Cc: <w3c-wai-er-ig@w3.org>
> Tim Berners-Lee answer is at > http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/RDF-XML.html Just one of a series of great pages about RDF... > Now, the devil's advocate position would be: "the > expressions are hidden from the end user anyway > and maybe ADL will be so utterly simple that this > consideration is minor" I very much doubt it! The list of requirements that you have listed for ADL points to something altogether very complex and extreme: an ADL language is by definition going to be about complex logical and semantic processing. Quoth TimBL:- "Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a foundation for processing metadata; it provides interoperability between applications that exchange machine-understandable information on the Web. RDF emphasizes facilities to enable automated processing of Web resources and serves as the foundation for the "Semantic Web." [...] RDF [...] will enable the Web of the future." This means RDF gives us a great deal of processing power in its framework "RDF emphasizes facilities to enable automated processing of Web resources", and that offers distinct advantages over XML IMO. > So one of the things we'll want to look for is potential > real-life assertions and queries that will indeed be far > simpler to implement in RDF than in XML. I think the point that Mr. Berners-Lee was trying to make is that it isn't possible in XML without going to great lengths. XML simply wasn't set up for making assertions and for querying, whereas that is exactly the intent of RDF. Note that Mr. Berners-Lee also said:- "If you haven't gone to the trouble of making a semantic model, then you may not have a well defined one. [...] I'll end this with some examples of the last problem [SBP: see http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/RDF-XML.html]. Clearly they can be avoided by good design even in an XML system which does not use RDF. Using RDF makes things easier." - ibid. Summary: RDF is clearly for the Web of the future (the Semantic Web), but we have to decide if that future starts here and now with ADL, or if we are just going to use other technologies until such as time as more of an infrastructure has been laid down. In the defence of RDF, there are already a lot of RDF parsers we could use and convert (not withstanding Schematron), see http://www.w3.org/RDF/#developers under RDF Parsers. We could "adapt" some of these for use with ADL couldn't we? Kindest Regards, Sean B. Palmer http://xhtml.waptechinfo.com/swr/ http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/ http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/ "Perhaps, but let's not get bogged down in semantics." - Homer J. Simpson, BABF07.
Received on Monday, 27 November 2000 16:55:01 UTC