- From: Uche Ogbuji <uche.ogbuji@fourthought.com>
- Date: Sun, 21 Apr 2002 21:51:18 -0600
- To: "R.V.Guha" <guha@guha.com>
- cc: www-rdf-interest@w3.org
> > 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? I don't have much time, but this topic is pretty important to me, so some brief observations. I agree with Ashok that focus on the RDF/XML syntax has been harmful. In my own practice, I prefer to allow people to use XML that makes sense and then extract RDF from key "fields". In fact, this is such a common practice for us at Fourthought, that we built a system into 4Suite for using straight XPath or full XSLT for maintaining synchronized mappings between XML files and their RDF extractions in the model. We do this by creating a virtual partition in the model, the domain (perhaps a poor name: this is similar to what others call a scope or context), which does not establish a query boundary, but rather a maintenance boundary. But that's just a technical detail. Whatever system is used for it, I think RDF loses if we insist that people stick to the syntax in M&S and its successors. The model is the thing, and we should give people the tools they need to treat RDF merely as a valuable view on their XML (or even UML/MOF or RDBMS) data. -- Uche Ogbuji Fourthought, Inc. uche.ogbuji@fourthought.com http://fourthought.com http://4Suite.org http://uche.ogbuji.net Track chair, XML/Web Services One (San Jose, Boston): http://www.xmlconference.com/ RDF Query using Versa - http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-thi nk10/index.html WSDL and the Wild, Wild West - http://adtmag.com/article.asp?id=6004 XML, The Model Driven Architecture, and RDF @ XML Europe - http://www.xmleurope.com/2002/kttrack.asp#themodel
Received on Monday, 22 April 2002 00:21:07 UTC