RE: Schemas Article

[Jeff Lowery <jlowery@scenicsoft.com>]

> I am not very familiar with RDF, 

Ditto. Just general impressions.

> but in my opinion, RDF sits 
> on top of xml
> schemas, and actually is for a different purpose. I think it 
> is more to
> define semantics of much larger granularity than xml schemas, and
> semantics that are typically not defined in xml schemas -- 
> for example,
> semantics like the who created a web page, or saying 
> something like this
> collection of web documents form a "community" -- so now 
> search engines
> can make use of such metalevel information for better results 
> -- this is
> building the semantic web...

RDF has struck me as saying more about the relationships between types than
XML Schema; it's more relationship focused. I'm not sure if that's apparent
or real in the case of RDF, but certainly there seems, in general, to be a
dichotomy between schema languages that focus on the defininition of
entities and those that focus on the relationship between entities, although
every schema language has a little of both. I'm not sure why this dichotomy
exists, because it certainly seems plausible that a schema language can be
fully and flexibly descriptive of both entities and entity relationships.
Maybe its that such schema languages exist but have been less than
successful.