Re: a new way of thinking about RDF and RDF Schema

[Peter F. Patel-Schneider]

>
> Ahh.  But suppose that you wanted to assign (RDF-ish) meaning to every XML
> document?  I haven't seen any schems that can do so.
>

Well, you can do so using the edge-labeling approach I posted about last
week or so.  You get an edge labeled graph, and that ought to be "RDF-ish"
enough.  In this approach, every element name becomes an edge label (i.e., a
property) and there are lots of anonymous nodes - in fact they are all
anonymous.  You can only know them by their properties, except that text
nodes contain strings - they could be literals, in other words.

Nothing else is really possible in an automated, uniform way, because with
no semantic information you can't know the intent of the original creator.
Other approaches are possible but they still have to make assumptions or
leave off information (analgous to anonymous nodes).

One of these other approaches is simply to make RDF graphs for parent-child
relationships.  Another is to use element and attribute type resources and
describe the XML structure with brute force.  But these seem to pretty
unsatisfying to me.  I'd rather produce the edge-labeled graphs.  At least
they do look RDF-ish and seem to make a reasonable amount of sense (to me,
at any rate).

Cheers,

Tom P

Received on Monday, 22 October 2001 21:50:03 UTC