xml-dev - Re: RDF? TM? (was Re: Didier's lab report)

[Uche Ogbuji <uche.ogbuji@fourthought.com>]

> Uche said:
> I just hope you're not mistaking me for anyone in the W3C.  I'm just a
> lowly developer as you are.
>
> Didier replies:
> I know who you are Uche, I am not a newbe to the XML-Dev world you know ;-)

Didier, no one would ever mistake you for a newbie to XML-DEV.  However, I
didn't assume you knew who I was.  Heck, I'm not sure how many people
hereabouts walk the marbled cloisters of The Consortium besides those
(Lisa Rein, Daniel Viellard, Lauren Wood, Tim Bray, etc.) who have
mentioned the fact.  Just about the only thing I know for _sure_ is that
Simon St. Laurent is not a member.

> My comment was more a comment or a statement that we poor XML developers
> depends on the gods (W3C) since they write the recommendation and the XML
> developers follow the rule to respect these recommendations.

Not necessarily, but you know the exceptions very well.  No reason why we
can't devise our own SAX, WebDAV, ebXML, etc. to meet the needs of
semantic adventurers.

> Uche said:
> I agree that some aspects of RDF's heavy reliance on namespaces can be a
> weakness.  But I want to point out that although the solution does impair
> readability, I think it's still a valid solution.
>
> Besides, if you don't mind one level of additional processing, it's quite
> easy to embed the rules about the non-differentiated properties into an
> attendant stylesheet.
>
> In fact, the product I work on, 4Suite Server, provides a mechanism for
> establishing RDF metadata from arbitrary XML using rules encoded with
> XPath.
>
> Didier replies:
> Interesting Uche, let us know when you'll have completed this new tool. I
> take a look at it with a lot of interests.

"Completed", you say?  "Ha", I say.  Is open-source software ever
completed?  Closed-source comes in a shiny CD labeled version 1.0 because
the nexus of marketing, financial and development goals have been met.
OSS, with all eyes on the software, has no pretensions about the
arbitrariness of "completion".

The software is available already at http://4Suite.org (and ready for
use).  If you'd like to have a look, I would recommend holding off until
early next week since we have many improvements about to be released
(including, hopefully, an easier install).  We have an arbitrary set of
features planned for 1.0, which we expect beginning of Q201


-- 
Uche Ogbuji                               Principal Consultant
uche.ogbuji@fourthought.com               +1 303 583 9900 x 101
Fourthought, Inc.                         http://Fourthought.com
4735 East Walnut St, Ste. C, Boulder, CO 80301-2537, USA
Software-engineering, knowledge-management, XML, CORBA, Linux, Python