RDF Question

Hello,

I am not too familiar with the syntax of RDF and I have a couple of
questions I am hoping someone could help me with. Thanks in advance for
any comments.

1. I am under the impression that when RDF is used for web service
descriptions, it can not describe the "actual"/syntactic data types of
composite data structures passed around as parameters. Is this correct?
For example: in a realtor advertisement, a service takes some user inputs
and returns a list of apartments, and each apartment has a "Location" data
structure attached to it. I might be able to find out in the schema file
the ontology such as what classes are of "sameClassAs" relationships to
"Location" class and "Location" class is eventually a subClassOf "Thing".
But I won't find the syntactic information such as sub-field description
of data structure "Location" which may include a street number(String), a
telephone number (int). etc. Is my understanding correct so far?

2. if what I said in 1 is correct, can I specify somewhere using RDF
syntax the actual sub-elements of a composite data structure?   For
example, is it possible to import a schema/dtd file into RDF for data
structure description at syntax level rather than at semantic level?

Thanks a lot, any help would be greatly appreciated!

Yiqiao

Received on Wednesday, 22 January 2003 23:47:34 UTC