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> At 11/4/02 07:00 PM, Simon St. Laurent wrote:
> >"Eschew mixed content" seemed the most ridiculous (and memorable) at the
> >time, and I'd been having particular annoyances with general failures to
> >appreciate mixed content at that point. (Both W3C XML Schema and RELAX
> >NG seem to treat it as a special case rather than as something quite
> >normal, though RELAX NG is less extreme in that.)
>
> I think many people appreciate mixed content for its expressive power, but
> find it a pain to process, and so find advantages in avoiding the
> processing of it where possible. With all the additional constraints of
> RDF-conformant XML, it's even less expressive, and often even easier to
> process, so it's well-suited to certain applications.
>
> Especially metadata. I still find it a little ironic that while RDF has
> gotten so much publicity as a technology for warm and fuzzy AI
> pie-in-the-sky technology, it's gotten most of its traction in the mundane
> world of metadata. Try searching oclc.org (The Online Computer Library
> Center--"Helping libraries serve people") for "RDF". When searching from
> their home page, the first 15 or so hits all go to the same RDF/Topic Map
> integration project, but many hits after that go to all kinds of different
> work going on there. And for successful use of RDF in metadata, there's
> always Mozilla...
Hmm. To be honest, I never really see much about RDF-as-AI-reborn until I
step into the very strange worlds of www-rdf-interest and www-rdf-logic. No
offence to the effulgent minds that roam those grounds, but there is no better
place to go to make my brain hurt. (Well sometimes python-dev comes close).
I have always used RDF for metadata, and my projects for RDF have always
concerned metadata. I think you and I chatted about this at XML 2001, Bob.
My articles have also de-emphasized the strong AI pretensions, because I think
they are dangerous to RDF's credibility.
If enough people find RDF as a valuable format for metadata (and as has been
pointed out in this thread, many are, even in the bureaus of the Fortune 500),
then some clever scientists may yet come along with gee-whiz-gosh-wow
inference engines and reasoning tools that can make a
hacktar/skynet/HAL9000-sized intelligence out of the critical mass of metadata.
I'm certainly not waiting for such a contingency before getting practical use
out of RDF. Many others aren't, either.
--
Uche Ogbuji Fourthought, Inc.
http://uche.ogbuji.net http://4Suite.org http://fourthought.com
Python&XML column: 2. Introducing PyXML - http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/09/25/p
y.html
The Past, Present and Future of Web Services 1 - http://www.webservices.org/ind
ex.php/article/articleview/663/1/24/
The Past, Present and Future of Web Services 2 - 'http://www.webservices.org/in
dex.php/article/articleview/679/1/24/
Serenity through markup - http://adtmag.com/article.asp?id=6807
Tip: Using generators for XML processing - http://www-106.ibm.com/developerwork
s/xml/library/x-tipgenr.html
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