Re: XML Europe 2003 Call for Participation

On 2002-10-24, Edd Dumbill uttered to www-rdf-interest@w3.org:

>While topic map technology has always had an excellent showing at this
>conference, representation from the RDF world has always been thin.
>I'd love to see more proposals from the RDF world for XML Europe 2003,
>so here's your chance.

Fully agreed, flavored by a little curiosity. Whereas RDF represents a
fairly streamlined datamodel, constituting representational elegance, and
a strong push toward interoperable ontologies, I would see topic maps as
having a complex set of concepts aimed at little more than what vanilla
XML can do. That is, topic maps do not incorporate strong semantics,
whereas the RDF community embraces a strong push towards making its
semantics unambiguous. To me this suggests that topic maps are little more
than an extra transfer syntax, while things built on RDF (another transfer
syntax/data model) hold a much broader promise.

Against this background, it's peculiar at the very least that topic maps
would be the technology to prevail in XML Europe. In XML Finland, it
seemed that Semantic Web rather took the show. If TM really has been the
king of XML-E, it's high time the tide turned.
-- 
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 Thursday, 24 October 2002 16:04:01 UTC