Re: My action item on RDDL/RDF

Paul Prescod wrote:

> > I'm unconvinced that this really buys anything, but it's probably
> > cheap to assert that this RDDL applies to namespace X; obviously you
> > have to be able to claim to belong to more than one namespace.
>
> Why?

The notion that you limit a RDDL to apply to one and only one namespace 
seems like a totally artificial limitation that buys nothing and 
eliminates interesting possibilities.

> > ...
> > Well, if you think of a namespace as a resource then a RDDL is a
> > representation of that resource, so that establishes one end of the
> > relationship.
>
> Not in a way that will be accessible to RDF processors. They have no
> notion of the relationship between resource and representation, AFAIK.

Aahhh... the RDF tax strikes again.  I want to do something that is 
obvious and straightforward and implicit in the resource/representation 
relationship, and using RDF is going to cost me oceans of arcane totally 
human-opaque syntax.

> > ...  At no point has RDDL ever built in syntax to assert the
> > relationship of these resources to the namespace, since any reasonable
> > person will point out that this can be inferred from its being in the
> > representation of the namespace.
>
> I'm not worried about people, I'm worried about machines.

A machine is entirely capable of detecting the condition that some 
assertions are contained in the representation of a resource and 
inferring the fact that the assertions are related to the resource.  It 
should not be necessary to duplicate the assertion of this 
machine-detectable relationship. -Tim

Received on Monday, 11 November 2002 21:05:27 UTC