OASIS Mailing List ArchivesView the OASIS mailing list archive below
or browse/search using MarkMail.

 


Help: OASIS Mailing Lists Help | MarkMail Help

 


 

   Re: [xml-dev] syntactical clarity of datamodels, rdf?

[ Lists Home | Date Index | Thread Index ]

bry@itnisk.com wrote:

>>There seems to be a tension between the experts (especially logicians 
>>and ontologists) who have gotten used to it (but they tend tu use the N3 
>>compact notation), and think that rdf will be all generated by tools so 
>>who cares about the syntax, and people would would like to casually 
>>author it, like you and me.  I thnk that causal and easy authoring will 
>>be important for helping get widespread adoption (if that ever happens).
>>
>>
>>    
>>
>Actually I've heard that idea of the syntax doesn't matter before, it matters
>for me not because I might want to write in it, if that was the extent of my
>problem I would make some tolerable private syntax and just convert it. What
>bothers me is that if I want to make applications that support a data language I
>will need to be able to at some level think in the language, and I happen to
>always need to think in a language at the syntactical level. If the syntax of
>the data language obscures the data model too much I find it really difficult to
>think in it, and thus to build stuff that takes advantage of it. I bet lots of
>others have the same problem. 
>So in other words, for the ontologists and logicians out there, I'm complaining
>cause I'm the guy who has to make the tools that generate this syntax (or more
>likely reasons in the sytax) that makes me violent. If the tools are gonna have
>to be online I don't really have the luxury of using a private syntax and
>transforming RDF instances into that before starting to work with it. Thanks a
>lot ontologists and logicians.
>  
>

Syntax does matter, but for humans it's a matter of convenience. I 
suggest you use one that you feel comfortable with - maybe TriX [1], 
that's quite graph-oriented.
The ontologists and logicians in particular have been using alternate 
syntax styles - see the OWL XML  Presentation Syntax [2] (relatively 
simple XML) and the OWL-S surface syntax proposal [3] (Lisp-like).

As well as RDF/XML, TriX and n3 (and it's close relative Turtle) there's 
also RDFX, RPV...a few more.
The visual graph language (as used in the W3C docs) can also be used. 
You could always make up another...

Cheers,
Danny.

[1] http://sw.nokia.com/trix/TriX.html
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-xmlsyntax/
[3] http://www.daml.org/services/owl-s/1.0/surface.pdf


-- 

Raw
http://dannyayers.com





 

News | XML in Industry | Calendar | XML Registry
Marketplace | Resources | MyXML.org | Sponsors | Privacy Statement

Copyright 2001 XML.org. This site is hosted by OASIS