Re: Common Metadata (was:RE: RDF in XHTML)

On Fri, 20 Apr 2001, Danny Ayers wrote:

>I can't see how RDF could be practical without some mechanism for
>inherited/shared metadata (you've got a 1000 documents with the same
>author - do you need to specify this a 1000 times), but I'm thinking that
>because this is so significant it must have been dealt with already -
>seeAlso doesn't really seem adequate, I'm not sure of the history of
>aboutEachPrefix, but surely there is already some mechanism in place?

Hardly. Inheritance as a concept implies that we know the precise type of
the document (e.g. that the document was authored by a specific person).
Conveying this information via URI's, which is what RDF uses, of course, is
heavy enough to make for near equality with explicit metadata. And
rdf:aboutEachPrefix, on the other hand, is far to difficult to implement at
the moment. It only works within the one-world assumption, which is
generally difficult to maintain in the Web environment.

Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy, mailto:decoy@iki.fi, gsm: +358-50-5756111
student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front

Received on Friday, 20 April 2001 16:13:15 UTC