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Matt Gushee:
> As
> Simon St.Laurent wrote:
>
> > There's a serious divide between the two approaches. I'm very impressed
> > by some of the people who do regularly cross between XML and RDF and
> > that they can keep their heads straight as they do so.
>
> Yes, and I think the RDF model is not at all hard to understand:
> ignoring the standard terminology, it's all about objects with named
> properties. What could be simpler? But the XML syntax seems to obscure
> the simplicity of the model. I believe the source of the confusion is
> that people expect the structure of an XML-RDF document to reflect the
> structure of the underlying graph ... but very often it doesn't.
Yes, Matt. You're exactly right. Even as long as I've been using RDF, it
takes me a while to look at a modest RDF/XML example and picture the graph in
my head.
I think this is a criticism of RDF/XML, but I don't know that I have a ready
alternative approach.
The main problem is that XML is hierarchical, and so it is almost inevitable
that one will have to scatter all the properties of a node around the whole
document, making it hard for a human to piece together. To some extent, this
is inevitable because it's not easy to represent graphs in any textual format,
but the verbose overhead of XML makes it harder.
--
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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