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- From: Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>
- To: David Megginson <david@megginson.com>, "XML Developers' List" <xml-dev@ic.ac.uk>
- Date: Mon, 03 May 1999 12:15:16 -0700
At 11:21 AM 5/3/99 -0400, David Megginson wrote:
>The more I work with RDF, the more I find it fascinating in the
>abstract but annoying in the concrete.
Hmm, as I write this, I'm chewing away on a data set with about
half a million RDF tuples. I'm having an easier time of it than
David, but I think that's because I'm trying to do less. Mostly,
my software needs to answer two questions:
(a) what are all the properties of URL XXX?
variation: what is the value (if any) of URL XXX's property YYY?
(b) what URLs have <boolean-combination-of-property-names-&-values>?
There are two bits of complexity - one is that you have a boolean
associated with each property value saying whether it's a literal
or a URL. Although I haven't actually used it - in my data set,
some properties always have literal values, others always have
URL values.
The second is the "aboutPrefix" stuff, which on reflection I consider
a hideous bogosity. I know how it got into RDF, they had a drop-dead
requirement to be able to emulate PICS, which has this prefix stuff.
I can even understand how you might use it, but I still think it's
a mistake. It doesn't get in the way of question (a) above, but it
certainly plays hell with (b).
Perhaps the key is that I'm not trying to construct a comprehensive
object model - I'm just trying to use metadata to look things up.
I find RDF just fine for that. -Tim
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