RE: Generated RDF conformant with good practise?

Thank you for all that good input! I said I didn't want an answer; I'm glad
you ignored me. :-)

So in short (if I may): in XML the typing is built-in; the relationships are
implied. In RDF, the typing might or might be present, and the relationships
are (generally) explicit.
Howard

> -----Original Message-----
> From: www-rdf-interest-request@w3.org
> [mailto:www-rdf-interest-request@w3.org]On Behalf Of tpassin@comcast.net
> Sent: Thursday, September 16, 2004 10:31 AM
> To: Howard Katz; Libby Miller
> Cc: www-rdf-interest@w3.org
> Subject: RE: Generated RDF conformant with good practise?
>
>
>
>
> > The question of whether there *is* type info present in the
> original XML or
> > not is one that endlessly fascinates (as you can see, it
> doesn't take much
> > to amuse me :-). I think you could parse it either way: even without a
> > schema present, <bib> could be considered both a type and an
> instance. Or
> > does madness that way lie? :-)
> >
>
> That's exactly right.  In essence a specific xml element is an
> instance of a type (or "class", depending on your use of terms).
> The type is named by the element name.  Of course, for some types
> of markup, this notion is not useful, as for
> <strong>inline</strong> elements.  But when the markup attempts
> to describe "things", it is pretty applicable.
>
> [In a different post]
> >  An author is an instance, a real thing. How is a bib having books
> > in some substantive way different from a bookhaving authors?
> > Why do they need different relationships to describe them?
>
> As I said, it is a  modeling issue, or as you said, a conceptual
> one (the two are often very much the same kind of thing).  There
> is a relationship between a book and its author.  You want to
> describe (some things about) the book, and you need to identify
> the kind of relationship.  Sometimes, this particular kind of
> relationship is called "author".  Note that a person plays the
> author role in contrast to an author being a subclass of Person.
> Thus it makes sense (to me, anyway) to call the relationship by
> the term "author".
>
> In the case of the bibliography, a book does not play a role in
> the bibliography, not in the way that author plays a role in a
> book.  So I don't favor naming the relationship between bib and
> book by the term "book", though of course you can call it
> anything you like.
>
> Actually, I would say that a bibliography consists of "entries",
> where each entry describes a book or other publication.  The
> relation between a bib and its entries could well be called
> "entry" or "bib-entry".  The resource  representing an "entry"
> might be called a class "BibEntry".  Now a bibEntry could well
> have a property called "book".
>
> Again, it's a modeling matter.  It doesn't even have much to do
> with RDF specifically.  You would go through the same exercise if
> you were going to model the thing in a relational database.  XML
> lets you avoid some of that if you want - the missing parts are
> implied (to you, anyway, and hopefully to others), or you don't
> consider them important to spell out, such as the relation
> between a bib and its entries, because you think they are obvious
> or don't need saying.
>
> In this kind of modeling, there is often no one right way to do
> it.  The answer may depend on how you see the structure of
> things, and what you want to do with the modeling information.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Tom P
>
> Likewise, there
>
>
>
>

Received on Thursday, 16 September 2004 18:25:10 UTC