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Jonathan Borden wrote:
> RDF itself is hardly a standardized
> database schema. That is akin to saying that since all database schemas
> are written down on paper as a sequence of characters, that Unicode is a
> standardized database scheme.
>
> What Mark is trying to say is that the advantages of RDF, like Unicode,
> are better than the disadvantage of not having RDF, or Unicode. It
> remains to be seen if triples are this powerful -- we could, for
> example, get by with tuples as encoded as lists -- indeed KIF has many
> proponents, and I'm sure that if RDF were to disappear from the face of
> the earth, that people could take off with KIF where RDF was left
> behind. But similarly there have been alternatives to Unicode, and what
> Mark is trying to say is that there are advantages to having standard
> languages with which to communicate. RDF/OWL is not then a schema
> *itself*, rather a way to write down and communicate schemas.
>
I just re-discovered this page that Tim BL put up in 1999 -
Semantic Web - Why RDF is more than XML
http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/RDF-XML.html
It's actually pretty relevant here, even five years later.
BTW, I found this while working on on-the-fly clustering of bookmarks
using just their titles. All that semantic content in titles, and it's
so hard to get at (if you are not a person)! This title clustered
nicely under "Semantic web".
Cheers,
Tom P
--
Thomas B. Passin
Explorer's Guide to the Semantic Web (Manning Books)
http://www.manning.com/catalog/view.php?book=passin
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