Re: The Tragedy of RSS

Dave Beckett <dave.beckett@bristol.ac.uk> writes:
>>>> Nick Gibbins said:

>> However, I question whether the use of DC-in-RDF [1] elements in a
>> document which is not an RDF document can really be said to be a
>> use of RDF per se, especially given that the element names are
>> identical to those used in a 'pure' XML encoding of DC [2].

>> [1] Expressing Simple Dublin Core in RDF/XML
>>     http://dublincore.org/documents/2001/11/28/dcmes-xml/
>> [2] Guidelines for implementing Dublin Core in XML
>>     http://dublincore.org/documents/2002/09/09/dc-xml-guidelines/

> I'm baffled by this claim.

> I co-edit [1] and edit the rdf/xml syntax specification.  [1]
> defines a profile of rdf/xml, which remains an rdf/xml documents.
> Like RSS 1.0.  It does use RDF because it is RDF.

I did not say that [1] was not RDF - it clearly is. I was suggesting
that certain (ab)uses of [1] were not really RDF.

> [2] are guidelines and don't define an XML format but suggest
> techniques.  Your comments about comparing element names is
> ambiguous; doe you mean the XML element or the Dublin Core Element?

True, [2] is only a set of guidelines.

By elements, I meant the example XML elements suggested in [2], and
the XML elements which are the encoding of the RDF properties (which
correspond to DC elements) in [1]. I'd like to amend my original
statement slightly in light of this: for "are identical to", read
"could be identical to".

> Either way, it infers nothing to say that [1] is not RDF.

I was questioning the use of the term RDF to describe the use of XML
elements (with the same names as the DC RDF/XML property elements
defined in [1]) in a document which is not an RDF document (eg. one
which does not contain rdf:RDF, rdf:about, rdf:resource or any
RDF-specific vocabulary).

For example, is the following XML document an example of the use of
RDF? (ie. it is RDF?)

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<foo xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">
  <bar>lorem ipsum</bar>
  <dc:title>This is a title</dc:title>
</foo>

-- 
Nick Gibbins                                            nmg@ecs.soton.ac.uk
IAM (Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia)             tel: +44 (0) 23 80592831
Electronics and Computer Science                   fax: +44 (0) 23 80592865
University of Southampton

Received on Friday, 4 October 2002 11:55:27 UTC