Re: [xml-dev] When parsing speed matters (was Re: [xml-dev] No XML Binar

[noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com]

Stephen Williams writes:

> Or an RDF database.  You do realize that SQL and XML databases will be 
> subsumed by RDF databases and data models shortly, right? 

Are you suggesting that RDF is a good language for writing a technical 
report?  Have you tried re-expressing the contents of your XHTML documents 
in RDF?  One of the really important things that XML databases do is to 
give you really first class support for such XML >documents<.  I'm not 
saying you can't express such things in RDF in principle, but there are no 
widely deployed conventions for doing it conveniently.   RDF is currently 
OK for carrying the metadata about a document (who wrote it, when, etc.), 
but much less good for reprsenting the text of the documents, what XML 
conveys as mixed content markup, etc.  Document databases are an 
extraordinarily important application of XML databases, one for which I 
con't expect either relational or RDF to do as well anytime soon.

Nah

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Noah Mendelsohn 
IBM Corporation
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