[
Lists Home |
Date Index |
Thread Index
]
I admire your single-mindedness and certainty about the universe- I just
don't share it. I'm working on a project now that might use an
RDF-based ontology for a repository application, and, I think it just
might work pretty neatly.
It's a well-understood domain that has had a number of accretions over
35 years, with lots of variants on what things are called and how they
are used. I find RDF quite handy for that. XML in and of itself (with
XSLT) would just require me to write a bijillion (that's a precise
number, by the way) individual transforms, even with a star architecture
approach.
The ability to use inference engines can be really powerful and RDF
seems to my eye like a natural for those kind of applications, not as a
communications mechanism per se, but as a communications broker, with a
lot more flexibility than any ORB ever built- I never was a CORBA fan.
So, I must admit, at the risk of being banished from the list (of
course, I could always send out lots of emails with tons of offensive
expletives in them if I wanted to do that...), I like RDF. It just may
do for semantics what XML did for syntax. In itself, it has nothing to
do with XML- it's another beast entirely for another purpose (despite
what some ontological extremists may say). In the context of that
purpose, it's pretty cool.
I am short- I hope this doesn't make me a troll...
Best,
Linda
>Except that I get fed up with ontologists who keep coming round and
>asking why we bother with this mere syntactical stuff, and explaining
it
>gets more than a little irksome. Maybe they're just trolls, maybe they
>genuinely believe that syntax isn't interesting, but damn they're
>annoying.
>When I most need agreement, I can't get it, and I certainly can't get
it
>usefully documented. When I don't need agreement, it comes pretty
>easily. Workarounds are the best part of XML, as the syntax keeps them
>possible.
>We have the benefit of many available tools, built around the same
>syntactic structure. Use the ones that do you good and throw out the
>rest- until the next problem, when you just might need them.
I throw out most of them, all of the time. Works fine for me.
--
|
