RE: what RDF is not (was ...)

> From: Sandro Hawke [mailto:sandro@w3.org]
[Very good analogy snipped in the interests of brevity]

> So how do you encode some knowledge like "All men are mortal" or "Only
> 3 Sale-Items Per Customer" in RDF?  The same way you do in SQL: you
> don't.  You need another mechanism - some logic somewhere else in the
> system.  It may, however, be a standard logic, driven by information
> also in the database.  That is, the database can hold software written
> in some programming or constraint language (Perl, Python, i386 machine
> code, first-order predicate logic, DAML, RDFS, etc), and there can be
> conventions about how apply that knowledge to other knowledge in the
> database (eg for database validation or inference).
> 
> Putting other-language elements into a database like this is a common
> design style for complex database applications.
[...]

Yes, for a single application, written by a communicating group of people
and using a common technology.  How one provides a similar 'complex database
application' across the Web appears to require some more thought; in
particular, the problem of how to denote fragments of RDF that are 'code'
for some other mechanism appears to be addressed neither in the current M&S
nor in the proposals for extension that I have seen to date.  In particular,
how do I proceed if I only speak Perl and wish to prevent myself
interpreting a piece of
Python/Ruby/WOLng/Fortran-200X/[insert-not-yet-developed-language-of-your-ch
oice] code as 'interesting' RDF that describes a portion of a data
structure?

		- Peter

Received on Wednesday, 2 January 2002 13:02:44 UTC