Re: [xml-dev] ID/IDREF is evil

[Norman Gray <norman@astro.gla.ac.uk>]

Stephen, hello.

On 2014 Feb 20, at 22:14, Stephen Cameron <steve.cameron.62@gmail.com> wrote:

> [...] the RDF world, [...] from an
> 'ordinary' user perspective the tools are not that friendly

This is an understatement.  I firmly believe that RDF is as big a deal as XML was, but it's hobbled because, even a decade and a half into the revolution, the tools are still very 'researchy'.  _Part_ of the reason for that is that...

> which is not
> so surprising, its essentially trying to bring AI to the masses

This means that a significant subset of the people working in this area are interested in bigger/deeper problems than the RDF bit, so that as long as their students and postdocs can grok the syntaxes and the BFGs mentioned in your link, without the systems falling over more than once a day (I exaggerate, but less than you might hope), they're happy.

The other big subset -- who almost define themselves in opposition to this approach -- is the Linked Data people, who have much more modest ambitions, focused on interoperability and scale, and about fidelity to semantics in very loosely coupled systems.

The tools are still a bit of a headache, though.

There's an interesting series of blog posts at <http://haystack.csail.mit.edu/blog/2013/06/10/keynote-at-eswc-part-3-whats-wrong-with-semantic-web-research-and-some-ideas-to-fix-it/>

All the best,

Norman


-- 
Norman Gray  :  http://nxg.me.uk
SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK