- From: David Megginson <david@megginson.com>
- Date: 29 Feb 2000 00:46:05 -0500
- To: www-rdf-interest@w3.org, xml-dev@xml.org
"Perry A. Caro" <caro@adobe.com> writes: [snipped way out of context] > RDF may fail the using part without understanding all criteria -- > lack of full understanding of the model can get you into trouble. > When I help people who are having a hard time understanding the > model, I use this approach. The interesting bits of the full > directed graph can often be transformed into ordinary trees without > loss of information, each rooted at a node that was originally > identified with an rdf:about attribute. I agree, but I'd take it much further -- I find that the people I work with (many of them software developers, granted) find the RDF model terribly confusing, but light bulbs go on when I tell them to compare a Java interface public interface Person { public String getId (); public String getName (); public Date getBirthDate (); public String getNationality (); public Person getFather (); public Person getMother (); } with an RDF instance <acme:Person rdf:about="http://www.acme.com/ids/0001"> <acme:name>Jane Smith</acme:name> <acme:birth-date>1970-11-17</acme:birth-date> <acme:nationality>US</acme:nationality> <acme:father rdf:resource="http://www.acme.com/ids/0002"/> <acme:mother rdf:resource="http://www.acme.com/ids/0002"/> </acme:Person> When they realize that RDF is just a way to serialize objects in XML, and that they can safely ignore all of the bizarre pseudo-grammatical and pseudo-KR terminology (sometimes after several wasted days puzzling over it), they warm up to RDF a little. The model is a little less threatening to database people because it looks a tiny bit like relational tables (though incompletely specified). -- David Megginson david@megginson.com http://www.megginson.com/
Received on Tuesday, 29 February 2000 08:22:42 UTC