From: Peter F. Patel-Schneider (pfps@research.bell-labs.com)
Date: 01/10/01
From: Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org> Subject: Re: [on the value of RDF] Date: Wed, 10 Jan 2001 15:18:52 -0600 > "Peter F. Patel-Schneider" wrote: > > [...] > > RDF and RDFS provide me absolutely nothing for any of these, > > Really? Not even an introduction to the Web community about why > they're important? Not really, and in any case that doesn't provide anything to me, except perhaps as it might raise the general level of knowledge of the web community. > > because they > > provide me with nothing more than a mapping into triples---no domain > > theory, no axiomatization, not even a decent informal description---for the > > meaning of any of these things. > > Suppose I agreed that RDF is horrible. What then? > What do you suggest instead? We'd have to build > another semistructured data formalism with > XML and URI integration, no? (if not XML and URIs, > I don't think it's of much interest to W3C.) Is > that what you want to do? Are you really sure > we'd get something _that_ much better than > RDF if we started over now? > > I'm all for healthy criticism combined with constructive > suggested alternatives. But I don't see your suggestions. > > -- > Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/ As a modest proposal, how about building on XML itself? It has a data model. We could specify DAML+OIL directly on top of XML. (Hmm, this is starting to look a lot like what was done with OIL.) Perhaps the biggest problem that I have with RDF is that I don't see what good it provides over XML, and I certainly don't see that its benefits outweigh its drawbacks. I even don't understand what problem it is trying to solve. Of course, this makes it rather hard to provide a ``fixed'' version of RDF. However, I am willing to live with RDF, and even to not complain (much), as I to understand that RDF exists, and (perhaps) something that exists is better than something that doesn't exist. I just would like to have some understanding of the role RDF is supposed to play, particularly over a direct layering on XML. peter
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