Re: [namespaceDocument-8] 14 Theses, take 2

Tim Berners-Lee wrote:
> 
> ...
> 
> >For instance it certainly won't work to use the schema for SOAP
> > and the schema for XHTML to generate a meta-schema for SOAP+XHTML.
> > Putting a couple of RDF links in an XHTML document doesn't fix the
> > fundamental problem that people combine namespaces in unconstrained and
> > contradictory ways.
> 
> The problem of defining how namespaces can be mixed is a separate one
> and interesting though it is I don't want to  get into it under this topic.

For general XML (as opposed to RDF) developers it needs to be worked out
before RDDL can be useful for machine-oriented processing.

> The problem does not exist as such with RDF, because you can use
> as many RDF vocuabularies in a document as you like.  The schemas
> have ways of putting contsraints on what makes sense.
> They aren't syntactic constraints.

In a sense you're saying it "works" for one XML vocabulary. Of course
RDF is also a sort of meta-vocabulary but there is a wide gap between
general XML and RDF. As soon as I put an RDF statement in an XSLT or
SOAP or FOOML file, I'm back to the question of whether the statements
it makes are the ones the author meant, or whether I am supposed to run
some other transformation process before the statement becomes
meaningful.

If you find a document on the Web (e.g. through a spider), how do you
know whether the RDF should be directly interpreted or transformed (in
some way) and then interpreted?

 Paul Prescod

Received on Friday, 1 March 2002 14:13:14 UTC