Re: does RDF require understanding all 82 URI schemes?

> We want to make it clear that RDF does *not* endorse parsing
> URIs to extract RDF semantics.

hmm... but at least RDF does appear to allow it (even if this is not
endorsed), and indeed it is very useful to closed world SW systems. Note
that the "bind" keyword for qualifying namespaces in Notation3
automatically appends a "#" to any given namespace.

     You don't have to make your schema available to the world, but
     it helps machine process documents written with your vocabulary
     if you do. It especially helps if the email message or web page is
     written in RDF (in XML or in N3) and contains the schema
     information, as a program can associate the two easily, if it finds
     the mail or looks up the web page.
     - http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/Primer

The XML Namespace specification doesn't say anything for or against
dereferencing URIs, but it is widely accepted that this is allowable; hence
the inception of RDDL. But at the end of the day, why not make your
vocabularies available to the world in an RDF syntax where appropriate?
It's not all that hard to publish something after all, and if you want to
process something, then you can.

I'm not sure that anyone would want to process the XML Schema namespace in
an RDF system, but he or she might want to refer to something... I take
your point that we can use rdfs:isDefinedBy for this purpose, but I still
think it is a bit of a hack to cover up some fundamental conflicts (i.e.
opacity and concatenation).

--
Kindest Regards,
Sean B. Palmer
@prefix : <http://webns.net/roughterms/> .
[ :name "Sean B. Palmer" ] :hasHomepage <http://infomesh.net/sbp/> .

Received on Monday, 12 February 2001 08:44:40 UTC