Re: eXtreme eXtensibility

• From: Eric Jain <Eric.Jain@isb-sib.ch>
• Date: Sat, 25 Jan 2003 17:36:40 +0100
• To: "xmlschema-dev" <xmlschema-dev@w3.org>
• Message-ID: <001d01c2c48f$f00f30d0$3ad721c0@caliente>

> Wouldn't it be the best of both worlds if an instance document could
> be processed both by XML Schema tools AND by RDF tools?

Indeed, it would be, and in fact I had tried to get our data into a form
that is both valid RDF *and* can be used in a more conventional way, if you
ignore the rdf:* attributes and can get over the fact that the top level
element must be called <RDF>, that is.

Unfortunately, the current RDF/XML serialization syntax is not quite
flexible enough to do so properly in all cases. Consider the following piece
of plain XML:

  <entry id="E12345">
    <name id="_1">...</name>
    <gene>
      <name id="_2">...</name>
    </gene>
    <comment>
        <author>EAJ</author>
        <text>...</text>
        <item ref="_1"/>
        <item ref="_2"/>
    </comment>
  </entry>


RDF/XML:

  <Entry rdf:ID="E12345">
    <name rdf:ID="_1">...</name>
    <gene rdf:parseType="Resource">
      <name rdf:ID="_2">...</name>
    </gene>
    <comment ref:ID="_3" rdf:parseType="Resource">
        <author>EAJ</author>
        <text>...</text>
    </comment>
  </Entry>
  <rdf:Description about="_1" rdf:resource="_3"/>
  <rdf:Description about="_2" rdf:resource="_3"/>


I'm not sure that providing an XML Schema for latter form still makes sense,
unless the two 'rdf:Description' elements could be moved into the 'Entry'
element (which I believe is not possible).


--
Eric Jain

Received on Saturday, 25 January 2003 11:36:45 UTC