RE: On the integration of Topic Maps and RDF

Hi Peter,

Thank you for your comments !

> I think that we will have to ``agree to disagree'' on whether mappings
> between Topic Maps and RDF should preserve meaning.

I think we agree that no information should be lost in order to potentially
convey the same meaning if interpreted in the same way. And that constraint
holds for our mapping.

> I strongly, no, passionately, believe that such mappings have to be
> model-mappins that preserve meaning, at least if one is to hold the view
> that RDF is a representation formalism.  If RDF is a representation
> formalism, then positive ground binary relations have to be represented as
> RDF triples.  Otherwise, RDF is just some syntactic encoding, and the
> entire meaning is conveyed in some outside-of-RDF (and, probably,
> outside of
> the web) side agreement.

We are talking about two different things:
1) Your goal is to be able to query different sources without having to know
anything about the data model of the sources. That would be a great
solution, I would love to see that for RDF and Topic Maps without
substantial loss of information.
2) Our goal was to start out with a way to be able to query different
sources the data model of which we know. The agreements you mentioned are
partly specified in the RDF schema we defined (with the exception of the
representation of the hypergraph elements from the Topic Map data model).
The schema needs to be elaborated.
Considering our goal, I think our results are valid.

Cheers,

Martin

Received on Thursday, 23 August 2001 19:30:19 UTC