Re: Proposal: "Canonical" RDF/XML

Hi,

I think this is one of the important applications of RDF queries - it allows
RDF information to be aggregated, then processed by "ordinary XML" tools -
simple XSLT scripts, etc.

One of the benefits of the XML syntax should be that many things can be done
with RDF without having to have a full RDF framework - there are a lot of XML
tools and development that could be applied to information if a canonical
syntax was available.

On the other hand, rather than suggesting there is a single caonical
approach, I thin what is useful is a simple mechanism for saying how to turn
given RDF into a particular XML schema for processing the bits that are
understood.

For example I am producing some simple Xforms for creating RDF. They work on
an XML instance file, and address it using Xpath - if I could collect a large
dataset and put it into a given syntax I would be able to add information
easily to that collection by using simple xpaths, and know that I was not
going to lose or miss things because of the vagaries of generic RDF
serialisation.

cheers

Charles

On Sun, 29 Jun 2003, Benja Fallenstein wrote:

>
>Hi all,
>
>I've been thinking about how to "canonicalize" the RDF/XML syntax, so
>that the same graph (with namespaces/anonymous nodes labeled the same
>way) always produces the same output file. A major application would be
>to interact well with textual 'diff'/'merge' and versioning systems like
>CVS-- if the RDF is formatted differently on every save, these tools
>lose their value.
[snip]
>What do you think, is this a sensible approach? (Can it serialize
>everything that can be serialized in RDF/XML? -- I think so.)
>
>Thanks,
>- Benja

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Charles McCathieNevile  http://www.w3.org/People/Charles  tel: +61 409 134 136
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Received on Sunday, 29 June 2003 02:56:15 UTC