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

[Mike Moran]

>
> What it all seems to boil down to though is that I can't represent that
two
> resources share some properties in a portable (vanilla RDF) way. I either
have to
> preprocess my own internal vocabulary into RDF, doing the expansion
pre-RDF, or
> define some rules to post-process the RDF model to make the inferences I
require.
>
>

Wait a minute here.  Why can't Mike create a resource having whatever value
he wants, and then create statements for both Tom and Jane saying that they
have that same resource as the object of the appropriate property?  That's
how you would do it in a normalized database.  It's true that this isn't the
same as inheritance, but Mike said he wanted a single point to update, and
this would do it.

This sharpens the question some: Mike, do you really want some kind of
"inheritance", or do you want single-point update capability for equal data
values?  Put another way, can you move from a programming viewpoint to a
database viewpoint?  Because an RDF statement can be viewed much like a row
in a database.

This subject also highlights a point I made a few days ago on a Topic Maps
list.  Many real systems will come to use certain idioms to express things.
It's too much to ask that a general purpose processor will be able to
"understand" all likely idioms, I think.  So how will we manage these idioms
so that they can somehow be shared and not remain private to my processor or
yours?  XSLT now has the EXSLT extension mechanism.  Is that a useful
starting point for something analogous for RDF?  Or is this not really going
to be an issue?

Cheers,

Tom P

Received on Thursday, 20 December 2001 23:30:09 UTC