Re: some questions on RefactoringRDF draft

On Tue, 11 Sep 2001, Brian McBride wrote:

>
>
> Aaron Swartz wrote:
>
> [...]
> > > Does that imply an RDF processor MUST attempt to create tripels
> > > from any wellformed XML??
> > > How does an application determine WHERE to start processing for RDF??
> > > Can it just make arbitrary guesses with a given XML document??
> >
> > This is a matter of some discussion among the working-group. It
> > seems the best way to do this is to look for the RDF namespace,
> > or have the user of your parser make it clear where the RDF
> > starts. However, the issue isn't closed yet.
>
> Whilst we have not defined a processing model for RDF, I think the
> answer to the question asked is that NO an RDF processor
> is not expected to process arbritary XML.  It is only expected to
> process RDF/XML.

Maybe we could pick a common use case here: RDF embedded inside another
RDF vocabulary. The SVG spec has just gone to REC, and provides a space
for chunks of RDF to be encoded within an SVG doc.

see http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/REC-SVG-20010904/metadata.html

An XHTML doc might contain several islands of SVG; which in turn might
contain several islands of RDF. I would hope that "RDF tools" would make
it easy to get to the triples from each such RDF island, and to do so in a
way that allowed my app to understand the context in which they were
found. Whether RDF tool = RDF island, I don't know (or, I guess, care too
much). Some combination of RDF and XML processor is going to have to make
this easy, since it'll be a useful thing to do. While it isn't our job to
define APIs between RDF and XML processors, we should make it clear that
'pure RDF' parsers will likely be involved in the context of
mixed-namespace XML handling.

Dan

Received on Tuesday, 11 September 2001 05:03:37 UTC