Re: universal languages

On Thu, 1 Feb 2001, Peter F. Patel-Schneider wrote:

> From: Dan Brickley <danbri@w3.org>
> Subject: Re: universal languages
> Date: Thu, 1 Feb 2001 14:24:49 -0500 (EST)
>
> > On Thu, 1 Feb 2001, Peter F. Patel-Schneider wrote:
> >
> > > From: Dan Brickley <danbri@w3.org>
> > > Subject: Re: universal languages
> > > Date: Thu, 1 Feb 2001 13:58:43 -0500 (EST)
> > >
> > > >
> > > > One might also point out that XML can "represent anything"... as can
> > > > Unicode...
> > > >
> > > > dan
> > >
> > >
> > > I most strongly disagree with the first part of this statement!  (I also
> > > disagree with the second part, but less strongly.)
> >
> > I assert that you should agree or disagree with both equally, for the
> > mischievous sense of "represent" that I had in mind.
> >
> > <Blob>
> >   Dan Brickley believes that XML can represent anything, but Peter
> >   Patel-Schneider doesn't (yet) agree with him.
> > </Blob>
> >
> > Dan
>
> OK, OK.  I hadn't thought of that mischievous a sense of representation.
> However, I still don't disagree with both equally.

That's probably enough mischief from both of us! "Being able to represent"
foo is beating about the bush; the important thing (as I think we're both
saying in different ways) is what we can do with those representations.

For that discussion to be had productively, it'd be good to have a
requirements doc.

Regarding the role of RDF in all this, there's not much more to RDF than
the modest claim that Web data standards should use Web identifiers
(URIs) to name pretty much everything. I'm certainly not married to the
idea that everything ever needs to be squeezed through the RDF 3-tuples
hourglass. RDF is plenty useful but there's more to all this than nodes
and arcs. I do think URIs are pretty essential though...

Dan

Received on Thursday, 1 February 2001 17:33:10 UTC