- From: by way of <DSkvortsov@SonicFoundry.com>
- Date: Fri, 19 Apr 2002 07:00:17 -0400
- To: www-rdf-interest@w3.org
[freed from spam trap -rrs] Date: Thu, 18 Apr 2002 19:57:39 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: <93482DE01BC3614A8B9D48C7111F38030DDA6F@kenny.sonicfoundry.com> From: Dima Skvortsov <DSkvortsov@SonicFoundry.com> To: "'R.V.Guha '" <guha@guha.com>, "'www-rdf-interest@w3.org '" <www-rdf-interest@w3.org> Just to elaborate this "distributed extensibility" issue that was pointed out before. XML provides a syntax and a set of tools for serialization. It can be used to transmit RDF or pretty much anything else. It is how you use it that makes a difference. In many cases XML is used just as a better recordset. All the semantics is hardcoded in the application. The advantage of this approach is its simplicity and performance. I do not see a reason why someone working on say number crunching application that takes data from proprietary XML would consider switching to RDF model. The compelling value of RDF is its data model which is first a directed labeled graph, second comprises a common understanding ;-) that graph's nodes can represent resources all over the world and third is cumulative. It's a perfect model for metadata. Looking deeper it's a very good model for linking different things together. Through RDF this linking becomes explicitly defined information which may be processed in a moreorless standard fashion later on. RDFS/DAML allow to effeciently constrain RDF statements so that mistakes/inconsistencies are avoided. I do not feel that there is a lot of semantics within RDF itself. Rather RDF explicitly adds semantics to resources it describes. Inference is essentially side effect of RDF's graph data model. To be relevant inference has to add value to the original resources. With respect to your friend's work - I bet they are using RDF data model without realizing it somewhere in their application. They should consider making it real RDF if they want to be able to integrate with tools from other domains. Indexing and search are probably the most obvious examples here. Best regards, Dima P.S. Article (http://www.cetis.ac.uk/content/20010927172953) looks interesting as description of where RDF turned out to be advantageous over general XML in E-Learning. -----Original Message----- From: R.V.Guha To: www-rdf-interest@w3.org Sent: 4/17/2002 3:23 PM Subject: XML Schema vs DAML/RDF/RDFS 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 Friday, 19 April 2002 07:49:18 UTC