RE: RDF An opportunity

Yes, I must say that I also strongly agree. As a student of computing, and a
relative newcomer to the RDF domain, I can certainly see that there is
potential for the great technology that is RDF to be lost behind a veil of
confusing syntactical quips and complicated semantics.
I also believe, to a certain extent, that we are all coders. Everyone who
works with computers must do some degree of coding at some stage - whether
it be raw JAVA or C++, or simply performing a sequence of inputs to the
system to make the system perform a task.
With this in mind, could it not be the job of the dedicated coders to
produce APIs (and such like) that are so immediately accessible to the
natively non-coder that they require minimal understanding of the mechanics
of the programming language? Thus, allowing us to abstract RDF up to the
level it seems so comfortable sitting in.
We've been looking at a couple of the more popular APIs (e.g. Brian's Jena -
http://www-uk.hpl.hp.com/people/bwm/rdf/jena/index.htm) for some of the work
we've been doing modelling RDF. Personally, I've found that Jena provides a
nice and simple integration into any application requiring an underlying RDF
data structure. I would not consider myself to be a particularly native
coder either, but I can certainly see, from my limited experience, how Jena
can be incorporated and used.
If we can make APIs all the more accessible to a wider skill-range of
people, then we can build a much more firm foundation of RDF data
representation within applications: abstracting to a level far more people
probably feel comfortable working within.

CraigP
Research Student
Content Technologies



-----Original Message-----
From: Irfan Shah [mailto:irfan_shah@hotmail.com]
Sent: Friday, October 06, 2000 12:09 PM
To: www-rdf-interest@w3.org
Subject: Re: RDF An opportunity


This is just to voice support for Colm's sentiment

"RDF can be open by a) hiding syntax completely from the casual user"

I feel strongly that the success of RDF depends on its take up, and that 
unless people - a lot of people - include RDF metadata with their pages then

the whole thing loses its power. The way to encourage people to use
RDF metadata is to make it as accessible as possible, and this surely, 
becomes a design problem.

As a non-coder, I wondered if there is potential, at this early stage, to 
engage in dialogue that looks at RDF through a combination of 
user/coder/non-coder perspectives?

It's a little intimidating addressing this to people who obviously have a 
firm grasp of the detailed issues involved in RDF, so please take it easy on

me if you think I'm off the mark here!



Irfan
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Received on Friday, 6 October 2000 08:33:50 UTC