Re: Linkbases, Topic Maps,and RDF Knowledge Bases -- help me understand, please

["Eve L. Maler" <eve.maler@east.sun.com>]

At 11:44 AM 4/6/01 -0600, uche.ogbuji@fourthought.com wrote:
>Oh, no.  Strong disagreement, not offence.  I'm quite happy once again to
>be discussing matters that interest me on this august forum.

That's good!

>Containers are one matter that I tend to group into the not-so-useful RDF
>category (at least until the "_1", "_2" mess is sorted out), but these
>could also be simulated in XLink using XPointer and a special container
>element vocabulary.
>
>Not that I'd consider it a good idea to do so.
>...
>My point was not that RDF is better than XLink.  My
>disagreement was with your assertion that XLink provides most of the power
>of RDF.  This is not true; nor is it true that RDF provides much of the
>power of XLink.  They both have quite different strengths.  I personally
>use each of them heavily, and I wouldn't dream of using RDF to implement
>content links, which is what XLink does very effectively.
>...

I had been thinking of RDF's "big idea" (the sound-bite view, the big thing 
it brings to the table) as assertions -- the tripartate notion of subject, 
predicate, and object.  Since XLink has a way of conveying assertions in 
the form of resource/locator metadata and (most particularly) arc metadata, 
I figured it would be fair to say that XLink has most of the power of RDF 
-- if you really want to use it that way.  This is no doubt too 
reductionist.  But is it wrong?

(I should mention that even though the xlink2rdf paper is just a Note, I 
kind of see it as the "official" explication of RDF semantics in XLink, 
particularly when it comes to using rdf:type in mapping resource/locator 
roles.  I'm a little sorry we didn't keep going and make this normative, 
but we ran out of steam.  It's there if someone wants to keep working on 
it, though...)

         Eve
--
Eve Maler                                             +1 781 442 3190
Sun Microsystems XML Technology Development  eve.maler @ east.sun.com