Re: need to determine what RDF is

From: Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org>
Subject: Re: need to determine what RDF is
Date: 30 May 2002 10:31:43 -0500

> On Thu, 2002-05-30 at 10:26, Peter F. Patel-Schneider wrote:
> [...]
> > I'm only interested in relationships between RDF graphs.  Which such
> > relationships are RDF relationships?  
> > 
> > My view is that the only such relationships are RDF entailment and RDFS
> > entailment.  Any agent that computes any other relationship between RDF
> > graphs is not doing RDF.
> 
> Why is RDFS special? It's just the first of many RDF vocabularies,
> no?

No.

RDFS is not an RDF vocabulary at all.  It is an extension to RDF, as
witness its treatment in the RDF Model Theory document.

RDFS is special because RDFS entailment is defined in the same document as
RDF entailment and the RDF Schema document is being produced by the RDF
Core Working Group.  

> I could understand a definition that said 'anybody doing more than
> RDF simple entailments isn't doing RDF', but I don't understand
> a definition of RDF that includes RDFS but not dublin core,
> RSS, DAML+OIL/OWL, etc.

Then why is RDFS entailment in the RDF Model Theory document?  Why is the
RDF Schema document being produced by the RDF Core Working Group? 

Why should RDF not include Dublin Core, RSS, DAML+OIL/OWL, etc?  Well,
RDF can include any portions of these efforts that are expressible in RDF
(by the simple expedient of including the RDF documents produced by these
efforts).  However, RDF should not include any other portion of these
efforts.  Why?  Well simply because these efforts are not part of RDF, as
witness the fact that the RDF documents do not give them any special
status.

How could the situation be any different?  It seems that you are asking for
W3C to bless any effort (e.g., DAML+OIL or KIF) that has any relationship
to RDF, even if the only relationship is the effort uses URIrefs to
identify its tokens.

[...]

> > peter
> -- 
> Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/

Peter F. Patel-Schneider

Received on Thursday, 30 May 2002 12:08:57 UTC