xml-dev - Re: A certain difficulty

[David Megginson <david@megginson.com>]

"Arnold deVos" <adv@langdale.com.au> writes:

> In our application we (a) subset the RDF model (leaving out URI
> pattern, for example) and (b) employ a simplified (non-striped)
> syntax.  So I suppose its not really RDF anymore.

Yes, DATAX does the same thing -- it's not an RDF library per se, but
a generic object-exchange API that happens to be able to read and
write RDF.  

My biggest problem in writing an RDF library was trying to puzzle out
what the real RDF model was, and my second biggest problem was trying
to figure out how to support it.  The RDF XML syntax itself was an
annoyance, but it wasn't a major problem once I figured out how to
manage the different states.

> What our application retains is (i) an interpretation of the *stated*
> RDF model and (ii) the RDF and RDF schema vocabulary.   

You must keep more than that -- at the very minimum, you probably keep
a fourth property indicating whether the RDF object is literal text,
non-RDF XML markup, or a reference to another resource.  Otherwise,
there would be no way to distinguish the string "http://www.foo.com/"
from the resource "http://www.foo.com".


All the best,


David

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

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