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

[Jonathan Borden <jonathan@openhealth.org>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Jonathan Borden <jonathan@openhealth.org>
> Date: June 9, 2004 9:01:16 PM EDT
> To: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>
> Subject: Re: [xml-dev] Meta-somethingorother (was the semantic web mega-permathread   thing)
>
>
> Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:
> > I'd like to see the use cases where starting from an RDF triple store makes life easier than starting from the identical information in more traditional XML. Use of all easily available free tools and languages is allowed (Python, Java, XSLT, XQuery, Owl, etc.) Reliance on expensive proprietary systems (e.g. Tamino) is not because as I saw on sign somewhere recently, "If we can't afford the solution, it's not a solution."
>
> There is no inherent advantage to RDF triples *except* that it is alot easier to canonicalize triples in, e.g. the N-Triples format than it is to canonicalize XML, or any particular dialect of XML. All this is saying is that if you have data that let's say is naturally represented as a directed labelled graph (DLG) and for which you might have 1000 slightly different ways to represent that in XML, triples *might be* a least common denominator format to represent the data. Might be.
>
> For example RDF/XML. The folks on the RDF Core and OWL working groups soon found that it was somewhat difficult to communicate using RDF/XML (Lots of these discussions were naturally about triples). It turns out that it is alot easier to just *say* the triples rather than try to express them in RDF/XML. N-triples (and TimBL's N3) is a convenient shorthand to author information naturally expressed as triples.
>
> For actual use cases which employ free tools, take a look at the N3 work that TimBL and DanC have done on N3 and the CWM inferencing engine all of which is written in Python. The strong impression I get is that for alot of folks who are hacking in RDF, the RDF/XML syntax presents a big overhead.
>
> For example here's a little N3 thinging to do with Atom:
>
> http://semtext.org/atom/atom-n3.php
>
> which "starts" as an RDF triple store. One could express the same definition in RDF/XML but I understand that a number of folks who are doing this stuff find it easier to work with N3 *for this stuff* than RDF/XML -- and that would be the identical information.
>
> Jonathan