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

[Mike Moran]

>
> Ok, to give a concrete example of what I am trying to do:
>
> I am using the head-body[1][2] pattern to represent meta-data associated
> with some content. I've attached the metadata in this way since the
> document will be passed around via email and suchlike, so we need to
> ensure it stays together, and because some metadata will likely be used
> to affect how the body is processed later.
>
> Now, at least two things are represented in this metadata: what the
> whole document is, and what the enclosed body is. For instance, the
> whole body is called a controlled document ie it has various Dublic Core
> attributes attached to it such as author and so on. Then there is the
> body, which by dint of being enclosed in the document should also be a
> controlled document, sharing some control information (author, rights
> etc), but has some other properties such as format (eg text/html) and a
> type (plus possibly other properties) which tells the system what it
> should do with it. So, we have whole-document metadata, and sub-document
> meta-data, with the RDF trying to represent the shared properties
explictly.
>
> On top of this, I'd like to factor out shared properties such as rights
> into a separate document, so that it can be changed once (eg if it is
> just to fix mistakes such as "Foo Ltd" -> "Foo Ltd."). Also, following
> from this, additional in-house attributes could be added to a type
> without needing to update all current live documents.
>

It seems to me that you can still do the job with RDF, and it shouldn't have
to be be tortured either.  FIrst of all, you have several parts for each
document, the head, body, and and the whole thing.  If you reify the
document, you can assign common properties to the reified document.  In
fact, that's the kind of thing I understand reification to be for.  Thus you
can assign properties to the whole document, the head, and the body,
separately.  Again, this is very similar to how you might do things in a
regular relational database.

>...>
> I'm not entirely sure if this is an appropriate usage scenario for rdf
> since I am making statements about things which exist in email and in
> the local filesystem ie not on the globally addressable internet.
>

As for identifying emails and local files, the emails should have some
unique identifying id numbers in their headers, which you can use to
construct a uri reference for them (alternatively, a property specifying
their id).  The files are addressible on the local file system, so you can
construct a file:// style url for them.  If you need to refer to specific
parts of files that are xml documents, you can use xpointer syntax for them.
A processor that does not understand xpointer will still construct the right
triples, it would just be unable to retrieve the referenced parts.

Cheers,

Tom P

Received on Friday, 21 December 2001 08:26:47 UTC