xml-dev - Re: RDF, again

[David Megginson <david@megginson.com>]

Paul Prescod <paul@prescod.net> writes:

> But we haven't got around to marking it up. 

Do you mean XML or RDF in particular?  I was referring to XML, which
is coming along very well -- see
http://www.oasis-open.org/cover/xml.html#applications.
is that we stop worrying about the low-level lexical details of markup
and start worrying about higher-level issues like object exchange
(RDF, XMI, or what-have-you).

> The heavily minimized version of your example is easy to read in the
> traditional XML sense but it is very hard to puzzle out the RDF
> graph for it. The uniminized one is great for machine to machine but
> not at all appropriate for anything humans would work with.  Why do
> we have to choose?

Because that's the nature of information exchange.  Any
fully-normalized information is going to be hard to read, because
you're going to have to jump around following the links; any
fully-denormalized information is going to be hard to process.

I don't know if RDF should have tried to deal with both situations in
the same spec (probably not), but switching low-level syntax from tags
to parentheses is hardly going to affect the fundamental problem.
Machines and people eat information differently.


All the best,


David

-- 
David Megginson                 david@megginson.com
           http://www.megginson.com/

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