RE: XML Schema vs DAML/RDF/RDFS

>Their analyses produce results. These results are assertions. I would
>model the analytical results. There may be the potential for inferences
>to be drawn among sets of results - a form of meta-analysis, if you
>will.

Exactly so. The analysis will (I presume) produce a bunch of figures - what
to do with them? Conclusions will be drawn or decisions will be made on the
basis of them, presumably by experts in the field. Looking at current
practices, then its quite likely that rdf etc wouldn't offer much new. But
this is short-sighted ("I think there is a world market for maybe five
computers"). The experts may be digital - expert systems have been around
for decades, though have tended to be fairly proprietry. RDF/RDFS/DAML opens
the field rather more to non-proprietry approaches, making it easier to
combine results across disciplines, perhaps using large scale and
distributed systems that communicate using web technologies, and perhaps
even occasionally produce findings that the human experts would miss.

Cheers,
Danny.

>I was talking yesterday to a friend whose is working with
>some geologists who want to share data. They are of
>course planning on using xml and are in the process
>of writing up their xml schemas.
>
>They have applications that do all kinds of sophisticated analysis
>on this data. They have no need of doing the kinds of inferences
>that rdfs/daml enables. Their apps do computations that are far
>more complex and it would be easy for them to modify their
>apps to make it do the few (if any) inferential facilities rdfs/daml
>offers, if the need arises.
>
>I tried to make a case for  rdf/rdfs/daml, but given the
>substantially more tools available for xml/xml schema and their
>lack of interest in simple inferences, I couldn't in good faith push
>too hard for rdf/rdfs/daml.
>
>So, should they be using rdfs/daml? Why?
>
>guha
>

Received on Wednesday, 17 April 2002 17:11:54 UTC