Re: Can RDF thrive in an XML-centric world?

At 07:56 AM 11/4/02 +0000, Jeremy Carroll wrote:
>>IMHO the RDF world should be learning how to
>>accomodate the XML world, not the other way around.  The core good ideas in
>>RDF are URI's and triples (while current RDF syntax is a huge liability).
>
>
>Yes, RDF/XML is inexcusably bad and should go.
>The rest of RDF is seriously held back because of the XML serialization.

I think RDF/XML has a bad press, to which it doesn't fully live up (down?).

Which is not to claim that RDF/XML is without problems, but in many cases I 
think it can do a pretty good job of application-to-application 
interchange, often with acceptable human readability.

IMO, some of the problems were with the original M&S spec, which wasn't 
sufficiently clear on a number of points.  And some of the problems are a 
mismatch between RDF's data model (graph) and XML's data model (tree).  And 
that XML has a number of complicating features that RDF doesn't need.

I think it's fine that there are other, more humanly accessible, formats 
for RDF (e.g. thinking of Notation 3 and graphical presentations), but I 
don't think that designing another XML format for RDF would be a productive 
use of energy.

#g


-------------------
Graham Klyne
<GK@NineByNine.org>

Received on Monday, 4 November 2002 09:32:13 UTC