- From: Jonathan Borden <jborden@mediaone.net>
- Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2000 18:18:08 -0400
- To: "Dan Brickley" <danbri@w3.org>, "James Tauber" <JTauber@bowstreet.com>
- Cc: <www-rdf-interest@w3.org>
James Tauber wrote:
> >
> > That's up to the designer of the XML schema. It could be one, the other
or
> > both. What I am suggesting is the designer of the XML schema is the one
that
> > specifies how an instance maps to RDF triples.
Dan Brickley wrote:
>
> I think that's right, if we want the triples to represent some
> meaningful entity/relationship style model rather than simply be an
> edge-labelled graph version of the DOM. I think Ora raised a similar point
> a week or two back; we should be wary of mechanically shovelling any/all
> XML into RDF and expecting something meaningful at the end.
I think we are all in agreement (mostly). How ought the designer of an XML
schema map XML onto RDF? I suggest that attributes such as "rdf:type",
"rdf:instance", "rdf:for" etc which can be defaulted in DTDs and XML Schemas
can serve as the mechanism by which this direction is performed.
But suppose we are dealing with 'legacy' XML or XML for which the user is
not in control of the schema. In this situation can an RDF Schema direct the
mapping?
>
> The thing that we need to be most careful about is talk of turning
> 'any arbitrary XML into RDF', as if there were a sole, simple answer to
> this challenge. ('Colloquial XML' is one phrase I've heard used btw).
> I can think of lots of RDF-ifications of any chunk of 'colloquial' XML. In
> particular, two broad categories: one where we reflect infoset
> constructs directly into RDF, another where we reflect the
> XML-encoded "application data structures" into RDF without preserving
> details of that encoding.
Agreed. In the first approach, which is what XSet, btw, is about:
http://www.openhealth.org/XSet. An Infoset mapping approach labels edges
with "element", "attribute", "text", "comment" etc. This is not what we are
talking about here. We are (or at least I am) talking about how to map
element and attribute names to *edge* names, as well as how to name the
resultant nodes (which at first glance become anonymous but really are named
through their XPointers).
Jonathan Borden
The Open Healthcare Group
http://www.openhealth.org
Received on Monday, 11 September 2000 18:28:28 UTC