Re: Why is RDF such a tough sell?

On Tue, 25 Jun 2002 MDaconta@aol.com wrote:

>I must be missing something.  We talk about "plug in" vocabularies -- I
>assume via RDFS.  So what is the difference between needing to know 1000
>RDFS vocabularies to do anything useful and knowing 1000 XML Schema
>vocabularies?

The point is, middleware apps (like syndiaction) do not need to know much.
However, they do need to be able to deal with data in a unified fashion,
and perhaps understand the data just as far as it takes to filter it. RDF
facilitates that, XSchema doesn't.

>I would love to see a sample program that does something useful without
>knowing a vocabulary beyond what RDF provides.

How about the fairly simple N3 ruleset which filters anything except RSS
out of a stream of RDF? Highly useful, if a syndication client wants RSS
only. Considerably more difficult to implement in an environment where all
we see are (arbitrarily mixed, via Namespaces) XSchemas.

Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:decoy@iki.fi, tel:+358-50-5756111
student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front
openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2

Received on Tuesday, 25 June 2002 18:20:21 UTC