Re: Why Rdf?

At 20:41 23/11/03 -0300, you wrote:
>Hello all, how are you?.
>
>I have to develope something to show the usability of RDF, but i couldnīt 
>see why rdf i so important or which is the usability of rdf. I think that 
>we could do the same things using java servlets and jsp.
>
>can someone explain me why to use rdf?.

I think this note by Dan Brickley covers much:

   http://rdfweb.org/mt/foaflog/archives/000047.html

The essence of this note is pretty much encapsulated by this couple of 
paragraphs:
[[
Just as missing out information isn't wrong, nor is adding more 
information. From an XML perspective, it is both tempting and natural to 
see this as a too liberal and free-form. XML encourages us to think about 
this problem in terms of tags: "what tags can appear inside a foaf:knows? 
is foaf:Person allowed? what about wordnet:Programmer?". Unfortunately that 
doesn't scale well, since it requires a painful amount of coordination 
amongst the parties defining these vocabularies.

RDF was designed to expect the unexpected. You don't need anyone's 
permission to invent new tags, or to have your tags 'go inside' their tags 
or vice versa. This is hugely liberating, particularly for FOAF because so 
many problem domains overlap in this space, and life is too short to spend 
in standardisation committees arguing about XML schemas for dictating whose 
XML tags enclose whose.
]]

The Internet brought us the possibility of networked applications that span 
the world.  RDF extends this world-spanning possibility to application data 
as well, by allowing the data itself to grow.

#g


------------
Graham Klyne
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Received on Wednesday, 26 November 2003 03:47:23 UTC