Re: XML Schema vs DAML/RDF/RDFS

> On Wed, 17 Apr 2002, Dan Brickley wrote:
> 
> >
> > On Wed, 17 Apr 2002, R.V.Guha wrote:
> >
> > Hi Guha,
> >
> > Interesting questions. Excuse the somewhat rambling response and
> > telling you stuff you've yourself said at various points in the past...
> 
> [...]
> 
> > RDF is a pretty handy intermediate representation for data exchange. But
> > I get the impression some folk feel it has been (to be blunt) side-tracked
> > into the AI/KR world, and that implementors are now expected to implement
> > everything in a logic programming / KR environment.
> 
> That feeling is very strong in many communities dealing with metadata.
> 
> > I think that's a mistaken view, and there are plenty of other
> > deployment strategies, but we've not been that clear on the various
> > options and tradeoffs available for implementors.
> 
> As you point out in the parts I've removed below, one isn't forced to
> choose between a 'syntactic' or 'semantic' approach to a problem. Data may
> be subject to various KR methodologies, and still in the end be accessed
> through more conventional information retrieval methods. However, the
> image one gets is that one is either a member of a semantic or a syntactic
> community, and that one have to choose. Obviously that is false.
> 
> My own experiments with using RDF in a digital library context have
> not been very successful. The problem isn't storing and exchange, but
> querying. The reason for that seems (to me) to be that for any
> data-structuring of any complexity, you will get a quite complicated
> graph.

Can I suggest you give Versa a quick look?

http://uche.ogbuji.net:8080/uche.ogbuji.net/tech/rdf/versa/

We developed Versa because we were finding that extant RDF query languages 
were not very practical: they didn't seem to integrate well into other 
systems, and they didn't seem to provide very basic and important query 
features.

Versa is quite a different approach: inspired mostly by XPath, but also 
lispish languages (though we try not to overdo the zen of lisp in it).  
Practicality is our watchword, and I've found it makes me very productive in 
developing systems that use RDF models.


-- 
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 00:37:27 UTC