Re: RDF/XML Syntax Specification (Revised) W3C Working Draft published

>>>mmoran@netphysic.com said:
> My main concern with this is what to use instead. As I mentioned 
> previously, I'm currently defining an internal standard, or template, 
> for inline metadata. This metadata will be partially manually generated, 
> and so shouldn't be unnecessarily verbose. A little syntactic sugar 
> would be handy.
> 
> I'm not tied to aboutEach, since there is no prior use. I am looking for 
> best practice here, so as to start off in the best way. I could quite 
> easily do a little XSLT preprocessing to convert uses of aboutEach to 
> another form, but it
> seems silly to do this, if an alternative exists.


This is why the RDF Core working group is working on a primer
document, to indicate ways how to use RDF, how the RDF model and
syntax works with lots of examples.

Can you say exactly the thing you want to model?

> To widen this a little: how is is RDF to be used by people who have 
> domain knowledge, but little RDF experience, and do not wish to write 
> screeds of repeated verbose data?

Even I wouldn't want to write screeds of data; I would get the
machine to do that, extracting it from a database or somewhere else.


> I am quite keen on using RDF for `proper' knowledge representation, but, 
> to be honest, the average user runs to the hills when they see a 
> slightly non-trivial usage of RDF (especially as RDF/XML). Is RDF even 
> *meant* to be manually generated? If so, it seems natural to those of us 
> coming from a programming background that it should support minimisation 
> of input, where shared properties exist eg if Tom has properties A, B 
> and C, while Jane has properties C, F, and A, it is automatic to group 
> the shared properties together and mention them first, then go onto the 
> differences. This syntax does not have to be reflected in the model, it 
> is merely a short-hand, but a very valuable short-hand.

If I understand what you are saying (not sure), use three resources
and make two of them be rdf:type of the first, so the properties of
the first are also on the latter two:

  <rdf:Description rdf:about="http://example.org/common">
    ... shared properties here
  </rdf:Description>

  <rdf:Description rdf:about="http://example.org/tom">
    <rdf:type rdf:resource="http://example.org/common"/>
    .. more properties here ...
  </rdf:Description>

  <rdf:Description rdf:about="http://example/jane">
    <rdf:type rdf:resource="http://example.org/common"/>
    .. more properties here ...
  </rdf:Description>

This can be abbreviated further if you define namespaces for some of
the URIs.

> I'm an RDF newbie, so I may be missing some things, but it seems this is 
> an issue if RDF is be a human-writable language.

I humbly offer these documents for humans :)

  Expressing Simple Dublin Core in RDF / XML
  http://dublincore.org/documents/2001/11/28/dcmes-xml/

  Expressing Qualified Dublin Core in RDF / XML
  http://dublincore.org/documents/2001/11/30/dcq-rdf-xml/


Dave

Received on Wednesday, 19 December 2001 09:00:45 UTC