RE: [xml-dev] Meta-somethingorother (was the semantic web mega-permathread thing)

["Dare Obasanjo" <dareo@microsoft.com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bill de hÓra [mailto:bill.dehora@propylon.com] 
> Sent: Wednesday, June 09, 2004 2:58 PM
> To: XML Developers List
> Subject: Re: [xml-dev] Meta-somethingorother (was the 
> semantic web mega-permathread thing)
> 
> 
> I suggest making an informed decison - read the RDF or OWL 
> Model Theory and decide for yourself whether 
> XML+Namespaces+HTTP cover it off - if you come back and say 
> yes, then we'll have something to talk about.

I've read a little RDF & OWL model theory and have failed to see what they buy me above and beyond basing my applications on XML/XPath/XSLT/XSD/XQuery. RDF people like pretending that the XML family of technologies ends with the XML 1.0 spec when this is far from the truth. 

I also find it interesting that almost every RDF booster talks about how the benefit of RDF is that you can dump all this wonderful semantic data in an RDF store and then query it. So where exactly are these RDF stores or standard RDF query languages? I can dump XML data into a relational database today and query it with SQL. I even could dump it in an XML database [or relational database with an XML datatype] and query it with XQuery or XPath. 

What exactly do RDF technologies buy me over using XML technologies for doing queries over FOAF + RSS 1.0 data, for instance. 

PS: Then there's the fact that RDF doesn't deal that well with mixed content. 

--
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