xml-dev - Re: A certain difficulty

[David Megginson <david@megginson.com>]

Len Bullard <cbullard@hiwaay.net> writes:

> RDF: why?

To exchange serialized objects independent of protocols or programming
language (forget about the semantic web hooey).  RDF is suboptimal for
this, but it gets a lot of things right (i.e. extensibility) and there
doesn't seem to be another reasonable candidate out there yet.  On the 
other hand, the RDF-Syntax spec is scaring people away in droves, so
it's hard to know what to do.

There's a lot of money in this: e-commerce requires much richer data
nowadays, and retailers want that data to flow from wholesalers and
wholesalers want that data to flow from producers.  If you take a look
at data-exchange right now (tab-delimited dumps, product-specific
tables, etc.) it's a bit of a bad joke.  Writing specific XML formats
for each exchange task is a small improvement, but you miss out on the
network effect of being able to share 90% of the processing software,
because the XML data model is too low-level.


All the best,


David

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

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