I gave a talk on RDF last night ....

To a local Java developer's group. The talk went for
about 50 minutes (including Q&A) and was to an audience
of about 120 developers.

Overall, the reception was friendly: people really do
understand that straight XML is inadequate and that
the semantic web might be a good thing (about a third
of the audience seemed to really get why properties
need to be independent resources. A much higher percentage
than I expected).

The most troubling questions revolved around validation. 

To wit (paraphrasing):

	The problem with XML is that everything (well, not 
	everything. But almost everything) eventually bottoms 
	out in #PCDATA. XMLSchema directly addresses this.
	Will RDF have a similar set of data types and a validating 
	parser ?

And I said something about the XMLSchema having done a good
job on this, and mentioned that the RDF working group has made 
a commitment to incorporating at least some of the
XMLSchema data types [Question: did I misread the Cambridge
Communique ?].

There's been some talk about datatypes on this list (cf: 
the recent thread entitled "do XML Datatypes work for RDF?"). 
But it would have been very nice to be able to nail this 
question down with something like "Version 2.0 of the spec, 
which is expected in [] deals with that by ...."

Anybody able to do that ?


William Grosso

Received on Wednesday, 8 March 2000 12:52:10 UTC