- From: Jonathan Borden <jonathan@openhealth.org>
- Date: Mon, 4 Mar 2002 18:49:40 -0500
- To: "www-webont-wg" <www-webont-wg@w3.org>
The supposed advantage of using RDF syntax for OWL is that it will allow OWL to take advantage of RDF software. Unfortunately the seemingly innocuous addition of an rdf:parseType negates the benefits of using RDF. A trivial example: <rdf:RDF> <rdf:Description rdf:about="this"> <ex:ontology rdf:parseType="Literal"> <expr> <forall var="x y z"> <or> <x/> <y/> </or> <implies/> <z/> </forall> </expr> ... </ex:ontology> </rdf:Description> </rdf:RDF> the point being that one can create a perfectly 'legal' RDF document, which through the use of rdf:parseType="Literal" embeds _some other language_. What is the point of that? i.e since you need a specialized application in order to understand the embedded language, what is the benefit of encapsulating it in RDF? If only to help us along the way to writing parsers, query languages etc, the RDF parsers and query languages won't help, because the the parsers won't understand the embedded language and the query language won't be able to inference -- we would be better off hacking together an XML based parser (a rather easy task when the language is properly designed) and using XQuery with an add on library. Jonathan
Received on Monday, 4 March 2002 22:50:05 UTC