- From: Graham Klyne <GK@ninebynine.org>
- Date: Thu, 18 Apr 2002 14:24:39 +0100
- To: "R.V.Guha" <guha@guha.com>
- Cc: www-rdf-interest@w3.org
This is a topic which seems to be popping up in number of areas recently. Part of the problem, I think, is that an single application gets relatively little benefit from using RDF -- the real benefits come when multiple applications can exchange information without having to go through transformation steps, which I think is the big appeal of RDF. (e.g. [1] contains some notes for a talk I gave to our development team a year or so ago.) A strategy I have suggested, and would be interested to know what others think, is to encourage application designers to use XML that is also DF compliant. In practice, this seems relatively easy to achieve for a good number of applications. An example of this approach is [2], which attempts an RDF-compatible form of XML for mail messages. The point of this example is that it was very easy to sell to our development team (for use in a message archive product) because, from their perspective, the additional implementation cost of using RDF in this way was practically nothing. So, in answer to the question "XML or RDF schema?", I might suggest "both!" #g -- [1] http://www.ninebynine.org/RDFNotes/RDFMetadataForEndToEndContent.html [2] http://www.ninebynine.org/IETF/Messaging/draft-klyne-message-rfc822-xml-03.txt At 01:23 PM 4/17/02 -0700, R.V.Guha wrote: >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 ------------------- Graham Klyne <GK@NineByNine.org>
Received on Thursday, 18 April 2002 09:16:29 UTC