RE: Multi-purpose documents? (Was: 3023 update (Was: <TAG stuff>))

> -----Original Message-----
> From: www-rdf-interest-request@w3.org
> [mailto:www-rdf-interest-request@w3.org]On Behalf Of ext Graham Klyne
> Sent: 22 November, 2004 12:31
> To: Dan Brickley
> Cc: www-rdf-interest@w3.org
> Subject: Multi-purpose documents? (Was: 3023 update (Was: 
> <TAG stuff>))
> 
> 
> 
> [Moving from www-tag to www-rdf-interest]
> 
> At 03:54 21/11/04 -0500, Dan Brickley wrote:
> >So RDF files are typically served application/rdf+xml though often
> >they have a "dominant namespace" whose presence drives the data
> >structures, with other namespaces typically being somewhat
> >annotational in their use.
> 
> While I agree with this observation, I do wonder if it's 
> mainly indicative 
> of the immature state of RDF usage?
> 
> I could imagine that in an environment where RDF is widely used, more 
> documents served may not have a clear single purpose.  

Yep.

Consider the vocabulary http://sw.nokia.com/FN-1 which employs
terms grounded in *ten* different namespaces. 

C.f. http://sw.nokia.com/schemas/nokia/FN-1.2.rdf

And thus, resource descriptions expressed using that vocabulary 
can include terms grounded in up to ten different namespaces.

E.g.

http://sw.nokia.com/uriqa/?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fsw.nokia.com%2Fid%2Fcfa26f83-32b0-4c3c-9d8c-3db5a054e3f5-10146%2FDesigning_Java_Application_for_Series_60.pdf&format=application%2Frdf%2Bxml&naming=uri&inference=include

As soon as a sufficient number of folks realize that there
is no need to restrict the terms of their functional vocabularies
to a single namespace, that the namespace itself simply doesn't
matter insofar as the semantics are concerned, you will see alot 
more sharing of terms between functional vocabularies (i.e. fewer 
terms defined that are equivalent to other terms grounded
in other namespaces, yet exist simply to have all terms used by 
a vocabulary share a common namespace) as well as functional 
vocabularies employing, a'la carte, terms grounded in numerous 
disparate namespaces.


> Consider the example 
> of documents using Foaf, which have been presented as 
> capturing the sorts 
> of things that might appear on a home page.  It seems to me 
> that, over 
> time, the Foaf content (and structural dominance) of such 
> pages may become 
> relatively insignificant.
> 
> (Compared with XML, I happen to think that one of RDF's big 
> contributions 
> is syntactically well-defined mixing and combination of 
> vocabularies, so I 
> think the RDF experience here could (should?) turn out 
> differently to the 
> XML experience.)

+1

Patrick


> 
> #g
> 
> 
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> Graham Klyne
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Received on Monday, 22 November 2004 11:31:30 UTC