Re: a simpler form of rdf xml

Henry Story wrote:

 > If we only map xml very minimally to our graph then I think
> we get very close to a default mapping of xml into a graph.

Here's a quick summary of the points that we discussed [1] on IRC, for 
the benefit of mailist-list only folk who'd otherwise miss it:

* There is no default mapping of XML document instances to RDF triples, 
other than the representation of the infoset in RDF, since XML is a 
generic framework that allows people to create an unbounded amount of 
applications on top of it.
* As proof: your particular mapping is based on skipping typed nodes, 
and as such will fail on all RDF/XML documents that use typed nodes in 
them. In other words, if you interpret every XML element as an RDF 
property, you'll fail on any document containing elements that are 
actually intended to represent classes or other non-properties. And 
that's for RDF/XML, which really *does* have a mapping to triples!
* RDF is highly inefficient for transferring certain types of data, e.g. 
for those where the natural representation is to use >3 tuples. XML is 
also rather inefficient for many applications, including RDF.

And as I said on IRC: "you're trying to find a mapping for all XML 
documents, but that won't work, so instead why not try to come up with a 
series of mappings that people can then choose between and overtly *say* 
work for their particular documents/languages?"

Cheers,

[1] http://ilrt.org/discovery/chatlogs/swig/2005-01-15.html#T10-19-31

-- 
Sean B. Palmer, http://inamidst.com/sbp/

Received on Saturday, 15 January 2005 10:49:25 UTC