Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: RxRDF and Rhizome

What drove me to build RxML was, first, the desire to be able to quickly 
and adhocly make RDF assertions in a wide variety of contexts: in plain 
text, comments in source code, arbitrary XML, etc. Second, to enable 
someone with the skill level, of, say, a html coder who can tweak PHP 
scripts, to author RDF without an extensive learning curve -- from my 
experience this is not possible with the standard XML serialization (or 
even N3).

I think until it becomes (nearly) as easy to develop in RDF as in XML it 
will be difficult for the semantic web to attain critical mass.  This is 
the broader motivation for the whole Rx4RDF project: allowing XPath, 
XSLT, etc. to work directly on a RDF model brings us closer to that goal 
-- both in terms of learning curve and ability to utilize existing 
tools, etc.

-- adam

Patrick Stickler wrote:

>On 2003-11-04 12:37, "ext Graham Klyne" <GK@ninebynine.org> wrote:
>
>  
>
>>...
>>
>>At first glance, I like your XML serialization for RDF, particularly when
>>coupled with the RhizML syntax.  Maybe we don't really need a new syntax
>>for RDF right now, but this does seem to capture a nice balance of
>>directness w.r.t. the RDF model, and simplicity.
>>
>>...
>>    
>>
>
>What concerns me about such well-formed-only XML serializations is that
>they cannot be validated based on a DTD or XML Schema (and yes, I know
>that RELAX-NG may work, but IMO that's not enough).
>
>If compactness is needed, for manual human input, then I would advise
>that XML not be used at all, but rather something like N3.
>
>If RDF/XML is ever supplanted by another standardized XML serialization,
>I think it is imperative that it be vocabulary/ontology agnostic, and
>be a fully well behaved XML application, able to be used with validating
>XML editors, etc. while at the same time, minimizing the number of
>different ways the same knowledge can be expressed, and being reasonably
>useful with tools such as XPATH, XSLT, etc.
>
>My own stab at such a thing is http://sw.nokia.com/rdfx/RDFX.html, not
>that I'm advocating any new XML serialization for RDF in the near future.
>
>  
>
>>Overall, based on a quick scan, I think this looks like rather nice work.
>>    
>>
>
>I agree. Some very interesting stuff there. Though I still remain a bit
>skeptical about processing RDF knowledge in the same fashion as XML. I've
>got a gut feeling that it "misses the point" of RDF in one way or another,
>though I can't at the moment put my finger on it...
>
>Patrick
>
>  
>

Received on Wednesday, 5 November 2003 13:36:25 UTC