yet another strawman, was Re: generic XML to RDF triple mapping

James,
>
> I believe that it should be possible to map arbitrary XML into RDF
triples.

funny you should mention this :-)

I generally agree, and would put forward that the 'mapping language' is an
RDF Schema itself. On the other hand with or without an RDF schema, it is
possible to 'direct' an RDF processor given 'minimally invasive'
modification of an XML document.

The simplified RDF syntax by Sergey Melnik itself modified from TimBL's
strawman serves as a basis for doing so.

The main problems are that anonymous instances are generated unless XML
elements are tagged with rdf:instance="..uri..." attributes. I would like to
propose a mechanism that does not rely upon explicit naming of anonymous
resources, rather uses an XPointer to a particular node within the XML tree
as a URI fragment to create a URI reference to the resource e.g.

http://www.example.com/somedoc.xml#xpointer(/person[@rdf:ID='123']/name/firs
t)

My strawman is here:

http://www.openhealth.org/RDF/rdf_Syntax_and_Names.htm


>
> I would imagine that powerful mapping language could be achieved simply by
> mapping XPaths to subject, predicate and object (and perhaps a handful of
> properties such as type and label.

It turns out that if you change the 'XPath' to an 'XPointer' it serves as a
legal URI fragment identifier and hence fits with the current spec (or at
least this seems to me to be the case ???)

Jonathan Borden
The Open Healthcare Group
http://www.openhealth.org

Received on Friday, 8 September 2000 14:28:08 UTC