RE: A weird question?

No, I mean using RDF to describe types themselves, not just attributes of
their containing documents.

The specific domain is that I have documents containing types that can have
different units of measurement. For example, consider a set of telemetry
describing the speed of a car in a race. Depending on the country in which
the race occurred, the speed could be in mph or kph. As part of the metadata
for the telemetry document, I want to be able to say "the speed data in this
document is in miles per hour". To do that elegantly I want "speed" to be a
first class object. It will be a first-class object in that it's been
defined as part of a schema. Beyond that, though, I'd like I'd like to be
able to do all of this within my RDF playground. So I imagine an RDF object
that describes the speed type, tells me things like "speed can be
represented using mph or kph" (both of which are of course themselves
first-class objects), and so forth.

Jeff

-----Original Message-----
From: Dan Brickley [mailto:Daniel.Brickley@bristol.ac.uk]
Sent: Thursday, December 23, 1999 2:29 AM
To: Jeff Sussna
Cc: 'xml-dev'; 'www-rdf-interest@w3.org'
Subject: Re: A weird question?


On Wed, 22 Dec 1999, Jeff Sussna wrote:

> I'm not entirely sure myself this makes sense, but I think it does. Has
> anyone thought about an RDF vocabulary for describing XML Schema
documents? 

This is pretty much what the DCD proposal (proof of concept?) 
from IBM/Microsoft shows -- http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-dcd  
Or rather, it makes explicit some of the assertions about
elements/attributes etc that XML Schema documents make. Or do you mean
the use of RDF to describe administrative and resource-discovery
metadata about the schemas? (eg. title/description/subject/creator etc?)

There are also quite a few people are interested in reflecting the
dataypes component of XML Schema into the RDF data model; I think that
should be
a reasonably straightforward task. That too would in a sense be 
'using RDF for describing XML Schemas', ie. given some XML Schema
datatype descriptions, re-describe that info as a set of RDF statements.

Dan

Received on Thursday, 23 December 1999 14:09:12 UTC