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

[Joe English <jenglish@flightlab.com>]

Michael Champion wrote:

> So, does the world need all three?  Just RDF?  RDF+XLink? RDF+XTM?

It occurs to me that there's another difference between
XLink and RDF:  XLink "knows about" the internal structure
of XML documents, whereas RDF only "knows about" URIs.
XLink expresses relationships between nodes in documents;
the fact that these nodes may be identified by URIs is
secondary.  RDF expresses relationships between resources,
and the fact that a resource's URI may happen to contain
an XPointer identifying a specific node is completely
irrelevant.

For example, in XLink <URL: http://www.foo.com/doc.xml#bar >
and <URL: http://www.foo.com/doc.xml#xpointer(id('bar')) >
mean the same thing, but in RDF they're different.


--Joe English

  jenglish@flightlab.com