Re: Simpler syntax for RDF / Counter-proposal

Tim,

thanks for your clarifications.

> Good.  But we should be incremental about this.

I agree. Here is a syntax proposal for public discussion motivated by
your draft:

	http://www-db.stanford.edu/~melnik/rdf/syntax.html

The proposal concentrates on the strawman's syntax. I did not consider
the issues you raised in the Toolbox that would require extensions to
the model/syntax. I believe higher-level languages should be built upon
RDF, although the encoding might be verbose and inconvenient for humans.
Freely quoting yourself in "Weaving the Web", RDF is a meta-model for
constructing languages for the Web. In my view, the process of building
such languages should start from the declarative languages of low
expressiveness that have nice analytical properties and can be
efficiently manipulated automatically. Examples include finite-state
machines, specialized query translation languages, trust rules etc. that
can be flexibly intertwined with each other. I believe, general-purpose
logical expressions that have global validity are not the way to go, at
least at the moment. But who knows: given your previous insights... ;)

Sergey

Received on Friday, 19 November 1999 03:43:33 UTC