Re: [xml-dev] Converting a variety of data formats, containingvarious ki

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

Greetings.

On 4 Oct 2016, at 18:54, Michael Kay wrote:

> (I guess I'm stubborn in calling it the binary relational model rather 
> than the RDF model. It's just that I first came across it in 1974, in 
> Jean-Raymond's paper on Data Semantics, about 23 years before RDF was 
> invented, and I think we should give credit where it's due.)
It seems to me (with no formal background in theoretical CS, but some 
practical experience of RDF), that RDF's data model is one of the least 
interesting things about it, on the grounds that it is at some level 
'obvious' and irreducible.  The only thing less interesting than the 
data model is RDF's syntaxes.

RDF's clevernesses appear to be firstly that it is a relational model 
which is adequately expressive, and reasoner-friendly by design (I 
half-remember being told that it was logically equivalent to Prolog, 
though I would become evasive if pressed on the deep significance of 
this); and secondly that it fits in to the semantic web layer cake [1] 
in a way which is integral to making the semantic web 'vision' still 
plausible, though still, and perhaps always, 'coming soon'.

I think that second point is deeper than it may at first seem, though 
detailed discussion might be tangential to xml-dev.

All the best,

Norman


[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web_Stack

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