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- From: Jonathan Borden <jborden@mediaone.net>
- To: Martin Bryan <mtbryan@sgml.u-net.com>,"Thomas B. Passin" <tpassin@home.com>, xml-dev@lists.xml.org
- Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2000 08:32:00 -0400
Martin Bryan wrote:
"Think of your average HTML document. How much (semantic) meaning is there
in any node label? In 99% of tags, none. Are Word documents (even those
stored as XML objects) any better? Or an XML-encoded Star document? No. To
apply meaning to such documents you have to associate a meaningful term with
the node. There may be more than one relevant term to describe the meaning.
Different communities (linguistic, cultural or commercial) use different
terms to identify the same meaning. You therefore need a mechanism for
assoication multiple terms to a single node. This is what Topic Maps do.
(Unfortunately, despite many years of screaming on my part, Topic Maps fail
to require you to record the meaning of the term!!)"
Using the RDF 1.0 syntax http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-rdf-syntax/ metadata is
distinguished from HTML by use of a <rdf:Description
about="">...</rdf:Description> block which may contain Dublin Core metadata
properties (this is the classic example). Such an element can be embedded in
the HTML header and is intended to distinguish between metadata and markup
used for layout purposes. Like namespaces or not, this is an excellent
practical example of how vocabularies are partitioned within a single
document.
It seems there is overlap between the capabilities of RDF and Topic Maps,
which is one reason many people are hoping that the two efforts can be
integrated.
Jonathan Borden
The Open Healthcare Group
http://www.openhealth.org
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