Re: Simpler syntax for RDF / Counter-proposal

Sergey,

Comparing your proposal http://www-db.stanford.edu/~melnik/rdf/syntax.html
and mine http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Syntax as they stand today,

They are very similar
- unstriped
- xml element matches in general to rdf property

I don't say anything about types.  Perhaps that is too simple.

I used rdf:fyi break out of rdf parsing and insert something in another
language -- how would you do that?

We both had the problem of how to know that other namepsaces (or element by
element) are RDF-transparent.  Some other spec I read rcently (XSLT?) simply
listed the prefixes in the documentwhich assumptions coulnd be made about

<rdf:prefixes   transparent="HTML, SVG"  opaque="logic">

Element by element couldbe done by using eth URI for the element type in the
schema (whatever that is).  Or (more messy) it could be an attribute stuck
on the element...

-----Original Message-----
From: Sergey Melnik <melnik@DB.Stanford.EDU>
To: Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@w3.org>
Cc: www-rdf-interest@w3.org <www-rdf-interest@w3.org>
Date: Friday, November 19, 1999 3:43 AM
Subject: 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.

I agree.

> 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... ;)


Well, I am totally in favor of the "principle of least power" - useing
simple
langaues - declarative, limied power - first, and then layering it.
However, in teh end the semantic web needs, for sanity,
a langauge powerful enough to unite all of them , including turing complete
langauges.
Tim

>Sergey
>

Received on Friday, 19 November 1999 09:30:23 UTC