RE: Explaining why we use RDF instead of just XML

On Wed, 2003-06-25 at 09:13, Bohnenberger, Keith wrote:
> I am relatively new to RDF but Im not sure I understand the comparison.
> Isnt RDF all about the graph. The subject, predicate and object and what
> you can do with them.  OWL is a standard for describing specific
> subject, predicates and objects for ontology representation and
> inference.  XML just happens to be one syntax for representing RDF but
> XML does not seem to be the important part of RDF (not withstanding the
> common serialization, transporting, parsing etc).  The logical
> capabilities of RDF do not seem to have anything to do with XML.  Once
> again, I am relatively new to RDF but this is what I gathered from a
> bunch of reading.  Am I missing something?


That's definitely true.  I think it's an important point that's lost in
this discussion a bit.  The debate should be RDF's model vs. XML's
model.  There are a whole lot more semantics involved with RDF's model
than XML's model.  So application developers should think about not
which serialization to choose, but which data model to choose.  I think
RDF wins out here, with a very rich data model.  I look at XML's model
and I think "so what?".  It gives my application more simple parsing,
that's it.  With RDF, my application is able to work with a data model
with rich semantics.  And, of course, adding ontological data adds even
more semantics.  I can mix ontologies a lot easier than I can mix DTD's.
:)

Seth

Received on Thursday, 26 June 2003 09:11:14 UTC