- From: Dan Brickley <danbri@w3.org>
- Date: Sat, 13 Nov 1999 19:38:24 -0500 (EST)
- To: www-rdf-interest@w3.org
- cc: jan.grant@bristol.ac.uk
RDF IG, A few things that might be of interest. This is an early draft of a document I started that attempts to relate current technology (RDF/XML) to the ideas sketched 10 years ago for the WWW. http://www.w3.org/1999/11/11-WWWProposal/ Information Management: Then and Now 1999-11-13 danbri@w3.org (draft) Excerpt: The original proposal of the WWW from 1989 included a figure showing how information about a Web of relationships amongst named objects could unify a number of information management tasks. This document describes a re-expression of this figure using W3C's Resource Description Framework datamodel in XML syntax. The original figure, included here as a GIF image, depicts a Web of objects, including people, organizations, technologies, documents and topics. Typed links (such as 'wrote', 'unifies', 'includes' are used to represent knowledge about their interelationships). [...] Note that this paper, and the accompanying demo, are best read after (re-)visiting the orginal WWW proposal document, available from http://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html -- in fact this is worth a read whether or not you get round to reading mine. RDF folk who've not seen it might be suprised... Details: http://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html Information Management: A Proposal Tim Berners-Lee, CERN March 1989, May 1990 This proposal concerns the management of general information about accelerators and experiments at CERN. It discusses the problems of loss of information about complex evolving systems and derives a solution based on a distributed hypertext system. The 1989 WWW proposal is interesting to look at from an RDF (and historical) perspective, since it begins with a 'nodes and arcs' diagram that looks almost like it might've been taken from an RDF spec. So... I thought it might be fun recasting the CERN-based example in terms of the RDF model. This wasn't too hard to do as a first pass; there are several approaches that might've been taken. I opted for the simplest: http://www.w3.org/1999/11/11-WWWProposal/proposal.rdf (an annotated XML/RDF file representing the CERN diagram from 1989) Finally, the document links to a little interactive RDF Query demo based on a version of Jan Grant's Javascript prolog engine[1]. There are known problems on some platforms/browsers, but when it works is quite nice. You can query the RDF model in a fairly flexible manner to ask questions about documents, technologies etc described in the CERN figure. When it doesn't work, the fault most likely lies in my code rather than Jan's: I learned Javascript by gluing together this demo around Jan's system. Feedback on bugs/glitches etc concerning the software demo [2] are probably best kept offlist, since we know for sure that there are a few problems. Basically, credits go to Jan, complaints to me! Anyway, I thought the CERN stuff made for both an interesting demo and application scenario (ie. intranet knowledge management, in current jargon) so am circulating these URLs in pre-final state. Dan [1] http://rdf.desire.org/~cmjg/test/prolog.html [2] http://www.w3.org/1999/11/11-WWWProposal/rdfqdemo.html -- danbri@w3.org
Received on Saturday, 13 November 1999 19:38:26 UTC