Phil Dawes' Stuff - Latest Comments in Time to deprecate RDF/XML?

Re: Time to deprecate RDF/XML?

James Tauber — Sat, 08 Jan 2005 18:53:29 -0000

Agreed. See my blog and More on XML and RDF in particular for more thoughts.

Re: Time to deprecate RDF/XML?

bryan — Sat, 08 Jan 2005 05:23:54 -0000

there are plenty of possible xml serializations of rdf that don't bite, the problem with the current is that it has numerous ways of representing graphed data, all of them in ways difficult to understand in xml, if there was just one way somewhat difficult to understand in xml it would probably have succeeded by now, because there are other xml formats that are difficult to understand that succeed [or at least succeed within their problem domains more securely than rdf xml has succeeded in its] so the trick is not to get rid of all serialization, but to instead agree on one of these simpler formats and stick to that one.

Re: Time to deprecate RDF/XML?

Phil Dawes — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 15:17:18 -0000

Hi Micheal,

Thanks for the comments - I agree that trix/rxr aren't likely to become success stories in the XML world. I was really thinking of the times when some application/agent wants to interchange some RDF within an XML document.
RDF/XML is a lot harder to parse than trix/rxr, and I suppose that's the appeal for me. Although thinking about it, that's not a good argument to replace rdf/xml as the defacto xml choice for machines talking to each other, since there's only a small number (few 10s) of implementations anyway.

I'm not keen on using XSLT for xml to triples. The primary reason is because XSLT is complicated, and I'm assuming you'd be using the XSLT to tranform XML into RDF/XML to import it.

Also, I suspect that it'll be easier to transform xml directly into triples given the right toys. This is a hunch though.

The bottom line is one of numbers - there are a small number of RDF implementations, and there are a small number of important web based xml dialects. There are in contrast so many xml users out there that I think it would be much easier to supply transforms, than to try and convince XML people to use a complex RDF serialisation format in its place. (Esp when it doesnt off them much value, as is the case at present).

Cheers,

Phil

Re: Time to deprecate RDF/XML?

Michael Zeltner — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 13:09:50 -0000

i do agree - i just doubt trix/rxr/n3/turtle will get widespread adoption (one can hope though) - trix and rxr mainly because of the 'overly' verbose syntax (yes i thought of entities here) and n3/turtle because it's simply new and people prefer to reuse their existing knowledge (even when they *should* be willing to learn new things, like in this case). one would need to prove that the use of rdf/xml is generally more harmful than your proposed way, and get acceptance for it (the harder part).

for xml to triples - what about a new transformation reference with xslt in the background? something along < ?rdf-transformation type="text/xsl" href="http://example.org/stylesheet"?>

regards, Michael

Re: Time to deprecate RDF/XML?

Richard Cyganiak — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 12:13:36 -0000

I couldn't agree more.