semweb syntax engineering

Sandro, re...

"The machine needs to dereference the namespace/tag URIs to tell which
tags are which kind of name, unless it has been given local information
or some kind of over-ride."
 -- http://www.w3.org/2005/06/semantic-xml/

that violates a basic design requirement of RDF/XML: that the syntax
be locally evident. This was an operational requirement of PICS
("I can't afford to fetch a schema...") but I think there's more
to it than that.

Hmm... I thought this was written up in
  http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/NOTE-webarch-extlang-19980210
or
  http://www.w3.org/1999/04/WebData
but I don't see it.

On the flip side, if you're willing to give up the locally-evident
requirement, you might as well go nuts. I have long thought that
the constrained RDF/XML syntax was only one part of the story;
that pretty much any syntax should be usable, as long as there's
a schema somewhere that tells you how to treat it as a logical
formula. This notion was in various drafts of various RDF WG
charters, but we have not yet pursued it in a standards-track way.

GRDDL is sorta the extreme of this "go nuts" idea, with a
totally turing-complete mapping to the constrained syntax.


Meanwhile, also in the syntax engineering space, I wonder
if you ever saw...

data, an RDF syntax born of jetlag and nxml-mode
From: Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org>
Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2005 13:30:42 +0200
Message-Id: <8D710417-6A0D-11D9-A29A-000D9338C596@w3.org>
To: public-cwm-talk@w3.org
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-cwm-talk/2005JanMar/0018.html

It's a response to the "tags are holy; only the standards
gods can create them" XML orthodoxy, i.e. things like

RPV http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/05/21/RDFNet

and

TriX http://swdev.nokia.com/trix/TriX.html

-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
D3C2 887B 0F92 6005 C541  0875 0F91 96DE 6E52 C29E

Received on Monday, 27 June 2005 21:08:43 UTC