- From: Charles McCathieNevile <charles@w3.org>
- Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 22:10:33 -0400 (EDT)
- To: Jonathan Borden <jborden@mediaone.net>
- cc: Ora.Lassila@nokia.com, www-rdf-interest@w3.org
On Thu, 24 Aug 2000, Jonathan Borden wrote:
I guess we are in a Catch-22 situation. On one hand we have arbitrary
XML -- who is to say what the intended semantics are, or the intended number
of triples? On the other hand we have RDF which is supposedly capable of
making semantically meaningful statements about resources such as XML
documents. Yet if the syntax of RDF is too complicated for simple country
astrophysicists hacking XML to understand, how will these unwashed hordes
produce meaningful XML? XML alone won't create the "semantic web".
It should be easy for people to add RDF statements into otherwise
mundane XML documents in ways that minimally interfere with the chosen
document structure.
Indeed it should. It should be a trivial matter of makingn the statements in
their favourite authoring tool, or of using a simple point click drag
interface to specify arcs and nodes of meaning. Sitting around writing pointy
brackets is like telling the poor country astrophysicist to use only a slide
rule because it's better - sure, it works, but there are better ways.
The syntax is not immediately clear, but so long as it is definitely regular
it can provide the machine-readability that we are looking for, and a person
who really wants to can read it by themselves as well.
cheers
Charles McCN
Received on Thursday, 24 August 2000 22:10:35 UTC