RE: What do the ontologists want

>> I was talking yesterday to a guy who has started three successful
>> companies in this area, who told me they had tried using XML and
>> discovered that the notation was such a crock that about 90% of their
>> transmission traffic was being used up sending meaningless notational
>> strings back and forth, causing performance problems; so they just
>> trashed XML and wrote their own notation.
>
>There's indeed a point here. Yesterday I was doing a testcase
>with 200001 concepts used in 100000 statements (no real application,
>just stress testing some inference engines). In that particular
>testcase I found that the RDF/XML file could be zipped 20 times.
>Using RDF/N3 this was just 4 times. So the XML file is 10 MB, the
>N3 file is 2 MB and the binary compressed file is 0.5 MB. Needless
>to say that this is having an impact on communication, storage and
>processing. We found the best balance with N3 [1][2][3][4].

Your figures speak for themselves, but I'm not sure of your implication -
that N3 should be used in preference to RDF/XML? Wouldn't this be throwing
the baby out with the bathwater? Performance and efficiency lie on a
continuum, interoperability comes in big discrete chunks - do we really want
an extra N converters? When the binary XML brigade on xml-dev have come up
with something workable, that perhaps will be worth considering.

Imagine the compression ratios that could be achieved with the messages in
this thread ;-)

Received on Friday, 18 May 2001 12:18:56 UTC