Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: RDFStyles: alternative to XSLT for RDF

On Tue, 21 Oct 2003 20:27:28 +0100, Graham Klyne <GK@ninebynine.org> wrote:
> XSLT is a pretty good hammer.  But why does anyone think that XSLT is 
> the right general-purpose tool for manipulating RDF information?  Beats 
> me.

XSLT is a pretty useful tool to have in one's chest if you're dealing with 
XML syntaxes. You can't blame people for looking at the RDF/XML 
interchange syntax and putting two and two together. It's not immediately 
apparent to most people the scale of variability in representation of 
graphs as RDF/XML - until their stylesheet breaks, then breaks again for a 
different reason, then again...

But I think there is a need for an XSLT-like tool that gets past the 
syntax and works on the underlying graph - this is my goal with RDFT[1]. 
My use cases are around rendering parts of graphs as XML or text, e.g. 
HTML views of FOAF or calendar. I'm already using it to generate certain 
parts of myRSS which uses a triple store as a backend. It has uses perhaps 
as a component of a larger RDF storage system, providing specific views 
into the triple store.

Ian

[1] http://www.semanticplanet.com/2003/08/rdft

Received on Wednesday, 22 October 2003 09:41:42 UTC