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

Jon Hanna wrote...

> It is if I also want to use /blah/metadata//dc:title from a non-RDF
> application.

I stand by my "hardly". Extracting dc:titles that way is a hack: for
example, you'd also need to get attribute values in case that instance's
author used abbreviated syntax (which they could do without changing the
graph). And XPath expressions are hardly good tools for dealing with XRDF:
making assumptions about the linearity of XRDF instances has done it a lot
of harm over the years, and led to some pretty gross hacks.

So whilst there is an advantage in that you can reach into embedded XRDF
instances using XPath and XQuery, the advantage is slim since beyond simple
hacking you'd need to implement a full XRDF parser in
XSLT/yourlanguagehere. It's probably about as much work as writing an
embedded-Notation3 parser in Perl/Python.

--
Sean B. Palmer, <http://purl.org/net/sbp/>
"phenomicity by the bucketful" - http://miscoranda.com/

Received on Tuesday, 5 November 2002 10:16:16 UTC