Cart
[Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries]
Mark Baker wrote: > > RDF provides an evolutionary story for XML; it enables to-be-developed > software to process old documents, and old software to process > yet-to-be-authored documents. Maybe yes, maybe no. In the sense that the triples would be there, yes. But in real, complex applications, I think that structures of triples will almost always play an important role. I call them "idioms". It is highly unlikely that unspecialized software will be able to make use of those idioms. In this way the older software may not be able to make good use of the newer documents. In general, the generalized software may not be able to use the idioms effectively. Let's say, for example, that I develop a fairly complex topic map, making use of a lot of topic map features. I can most likely translate this to an RDF graph (unless it deals with making statements about subgraphs). But a general RDF processor will have no notion of what to do with, say, scopes or instanceOf relationships. It will produce the right triples, but that won't be enough. If this picture is right, RDF won't offer as much evolutionary oomph as you expect. Cheers, Tom P -- Thomas B. Passin Explorer's Guide to the Semantic Web (Manning Books) http://www.manning.com/catalog/view.php?book=passin
|
