Re: Poll: RDF Use Cases

On Tue, 19 Dec 2000, McBride, Brian wrote:
[snip]
  So what are you're favourite use cases for RDF?

  I'll kick off with two:

  o Flexible metadata storage.  We have projects
    here with a need to store large amounts of meta
    data, but we can't predict in advance what that
    meta data will be.  The stuff we need to store
    changes over time, and we don't want to go
    updating a database schema each time it does.
    RDF looks good for this.

CMN:
I have a similar use case. There was a desire to collect accessibility
information about web pages, which might be as simple as "this page conforms
to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines at the level double-A", or might
be a very detailed assessment, element by element, including how a particular
evaluation was made...

RDF seemed, and seems, like the answer.

Here is a non-use case though:

I wanted to make an events calendar that I could use XSLT to make queries on.
I decided to use plain XML (because then it is easy to develop, modify
occasionally, auto-generate schemas, and primarily to just edit content) for
the overall calendar, although it makes sense to be able to use RDF for
describing some of the things in there (e.g. types of events...)

(The fairly minimal work I did on this is at
http://www.w3.org/2000/09/calendar/alpha1 and it needs some work)

Was the problem just that XML authoring seemed more intuitive, or that RDF is
an unnecessarily powerful tool for such a simple job? Am I right that it
makes sense to have RDF schemas for types of events, and other entry types?

cheers

Charles McCN

Received on Tuesday, 19 December 2000 10:44:36 UTC