Re: XML Schema vs DAML/RDF/RDFS

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