August 15, 2003

My gut on RDF

Christian Crumlish

I need to read Shelley's book, because I'm still fairly clueless about RDF. While I think it's silly to harp on colons in the format (would <a:href> really be all that hard to type or understand if that had been the format for HTML?), I have some vague sense that resistance to RDF along the lines that Danny Ayers describes in Simple Semantic Resolution - RSS 2.0 Module when he writes

It has been suggested many times that the standard RDF/XML serialization format is inelegant and cumbersome. But the RDF community is fairly united in the view that the important part of RDF is the model, not the serialization.

I connected this with the "which RSS is more literary" debate of a week or so ago and somehow got the idea that people who don't want to work with RDF feel the way you might if you had to diagram each sentence before speaking it, and then say it in some snail-crawl through the diagram tree.

I'm probably wrong on this, but I wonder what it is about the serialization of RSS 1.0 that RDF-detractors like less than the 0.91 - 2.0 lineage? Can someone explain this to me?

Elsewhere, Sam Ruby suggests adopting RDF for Pie only insofar as convincing RDF parsers to adopt default transformation mappings between Pie and valid RDF. Burningbird takes exception to this approach.

Posted by xian at August 15, 2003 11:47 AM
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