Web Services and RDF, Semantic Web

WWW-WS,

Having just signed up to www-ws, thought I'd de-lurk by airing
here a theme from XML-DEV and the RDF Interest Group[1] list. Uche
Ogbuji posted a note[2] to those lists a while back on the relationship
between RDF and Web Services. There has also been a number of discussions
over the last couple of years for conventions for doing generic data
serialisation over XML. Henrik Nielsen's slides[2] from WWW9 last year
show some similarities between the SOAP and RDF graph serialisation
syntaxes; section 5 of SOAP[4] adopts an RDF-like convention for
representing edge-labelled graph structures in XML. I have a research
scrapbook ("XGraph") of pointers to related work in this area[5], and will
update it if I've missed out anything. All this points to some unfinished
work on the relationship between these two families of XML-based
applications.

I'm interested in identifying common representational strategies shared by
Web Services apps and "Semantic Web" (RDF etc) apps. From the discussions
to date in this area, one area of common concern is for generic graph
serialisation mechanisms in XML. The XML Protocols draft requirements
doc calls this out in section 4.5 ([6]).

While there will likely be many XML protocol and Web Services apps that
don't have any need to buy into the RDF data model, I thought it might be
interesting to flag up some of the similarities between RDF's graph data
model and some conventions that appear useful to the XML protocol / Web
Services community.

It is sometimes observed that that RDF community can appear isolated from
the mainstream XML world. I'm hoping that www-ws might prove to be a forum
where we can talk about some of the shared goals and varying approaches
being developed. As RDF Interest Group chair I intend to point folk here
(www-ws [6]) for discussions about RDF / Semantic Web [8] and its
relationship to Web Services. I hope we can use this list to explore our
various perspectives  on what 'Web Services' might amount to...

throwing ideas around hoping some might stick,

danbri



[1] http://www.w3.org/RDF/Interest/
[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-interest/2000Nov/0207.html
[3] http://ilrt.org/discovery/2000/08/www9-slides/henrik/
[4] http://www.w3.org/TR/SOAP/#_Toc478383512
[5] http://www.w3.org/2000/09/XGraph/
[6] http://www.w3.org/2000/xp/
 -> http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlp-reqs/
 -> http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlp-reqs/#N400
[7] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-ws/
[8] http://www.w3.org/RDF/
    http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/


-- 
mailto:danbri@w3.org
ILRT/W3C
http://purl.org/net/danbri/

Received on Tuesday, 22 May 2001 18:47:53 UTC