Cambridge Communique

Dan Brickley wrote:

> the
> Cambridge Communique clarifications about the relationship between RDF
> and XML [4]

Pardon the out-of-context digression, but your mention of the Cambridge
Communique reminded me that I'm confused by that very document.  I've read
it, both at face-value and with an attempt at reading between the lines, and
the impression I come away with is that the RDFSchema and XSchema camps have
agreed to disagree.

This strikes me as tragic.

What I'm sure most of us developers want to know is:

* How do we decide which one to use (RDFSchema vs. XSchema)?

* Are we going to have to live in a world where we have to support both, and
have two sets of processors, two sets of specifications, two sets of user
guides, converters to/from, etc., etc.?

Also, I wonder if anyone can confirm my conjecture that the reason RDFSchema
is so underspecified is because of the long shadow cast by the impending
XSchema?  [It's been at least 6 months since I read RDFSchema, so pardon me
if the omissions I list here have been addressed] RDFSchema lacks some
obviously useful features, like concrete syntax for specifying whether a
value is required or optional, or read-only in a named context, etc.  Is it
because RDFSchema is waiting until XSchema defines those concepts, and then
will incorporate equivalents in a future extension?

Perry

Received on Wednesday, 10 November 1999 13:29:46 UTC