- From: David Megginson <david@megginson.com>
- Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2000 09:46:39 -0500 (EST)
- To: xml-dev@xml.org, www-rdf-interest@w3.org
Len Bullard writes: > But why not just exchange the serialized objects? IOW, is RDF doing > something I can't do with Java, C++, etc.? I have this uncomfortable > feeling RDF ends up being MID0.1: what we were doing before they > told us not to do an object-oriented programming language. Oh well... If there were a single programming language used everywhere and it had a single, standard serialization format, that might work, but there's not and it won't. Besides, a looser coupling is somewhat beneficial, so that different recipients can re-instantiate the serialized objects in different ways. I like to explain it to people like this: Data Model <-> Object Model <-> Interchange Model The level of abstraction increases as you move from left to right. > > RDF is suboptimal for this, but it gets a lot of things right > > (i.e. extensibility) and there doesn't seem to be another > > reasonable candidate out there yet. > > See last question. It seems we keep coming back through this time > loop of development: markup to wrap named property values, then > more markup to define the names of the names of the property values, > then more markup to define the relationships among the names of the > names of the property values. Jeez. No wonder HTML became popular. :-) There are several things you can be referring to here, and I'm not sure which you mean (schemas?). Anyway, I'm not interested in all of that semantic-discovery stuff; all I want is a standard way to serialize objects: <Person global-id="http://www.people.org/ids/12345"> <name>David Megginson</name> <nationality>CA</nationality> <parent global-ref="http://www.people.org/ids/54321"/> </Person> <Person global-id="http://www.people.org/ids/54321"> <name>Marylil Megginson</name> <nationality>CA</nationality> </Person> When I receive stuff like this, I shouldn't have to start down at the DOM or SAX level; it should be possible for an API to give me this: Object [http://www.people.org/ids/12345] attribute: name="David Megginson" attribute: nationality="CA" relationship: parent=http://people.org/ids/54321 Object [http://www.people.org/ids/54321] attribute: name="Marylil Megginson" attribute: nationality="CA" No schemas ... no extra markup to say what names mean ... just a higher layer of abstract above the XML elements-attributes-characters data model, so that I can hire Java or C++ or Perl programmers who have no XML knowledge and have them work on information-exchange projects. I took a stab at creating such an API with DATAX http://www.megginson.com/DATAX/ and although that needs work, I think it's close to what a data-exchange API should look like. Yes, RDF already lets me do all of this; I claim that it's suboptimal only because it tries to do too much more (and thus, scares people away). All the best, David -- David Megginson david@megginson.com http://www.megginson.com/
Received on Saturday, 26 February 2000 09:47:07 UTC