RE: Atom and RDF

[Dare Obasanjo <kpako@xxxxxxxxx>]

--- Danny Ayers <danny666@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> > > The issue of using dc:subject for category, and
> > > Danny's questions re: same
> > > as noted in previous email [1] to group.
> >
> > This is not a solvable problem in the general
> case.
> 
> How general do you want? It covers virtually all
> web-related situations (I
> can't think of an exception). It works for RDF. It
> works for RSS 1.0. It
> could work for Pie/Echo/Atom.
> 
> Say 'something' is a known entity in the following
> RDF/XML :
> 
> <something>
> 	<abc:wibble>Carrot</abc:wibble>
> </something>
> 
> Without knowing what "wibble" means in the abc
> namespace, we still know from
> the syntax that the entity 'something' has an
> rdf:Property 'abc:wibble' with
> the literal value 'Carrot'.

This seems pretty meaningless to me and no different
than what I'd get if I extracted unknown items with
XPath/XQuery/XSLT. 

> This is a huge head start for any processor. e.g. If
> another system asks
> "what properties has 'something'?", a system
> ignorant of the meaning of
> 'abc:wibble' can still selectively pass on the above
> information.

How is this any different from answering the question
"what are the child nodes of 'something'? 

> > The link is
> > http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/8/8/122029/2205
> but
> > the site is currently down.
> 
> I don't think the XSLT system you propose is 'that'
> higher-order model
> either - it might be handy for rearranging XML
> documents, but doesn't
> actually give you anything for the problem at hand.
> XSLT probably passes
> your Turing test already anyway - because it's
> Turing-complete *, so the
> system you describe, if possible, could be
> constructed. (*Smart guy, that
> Turing).

I didn't propose any XSLT model. I asked that whatever
technique you come up with for mixing namespace
vocabularies should be able to solve the problem of
automatically converting an XSLT processor to an EXSLT
processor since this is "simply" a case of mixing
namespace vocabularies. I specifically stated that I
don't believe this problem can be feasibly solved and
neither do I believe RDF is a stepping stone to
solving this problem. 

For example, let's say my ATOM entries contain a
<dare:stylesheet /> element that contains the text/css
stylesheet that is supposed to be used to style the
feed content or the author element has a
employee:level that shows someone's level in the org
chart which is is meant to be used to sort the posts. 

Now how does RDF bring my aggregator one step closer
to doing the "right thing" in this case? Even if it
does bring us "one step closer", is the increased
complexity worth it given that there are probably nine
hundred and ninety nine steps to go? 


My take is that RDF doesn't any practical benefit to
mixing XML vocabularies in the general case nor does
it even help the specific case of syndication feeds
and news aggregators. 

Now there may be other benefits of using RDF with
Pie/Echo/Atom/Whatever but solving the mixing
namespaced vocabularies problem is not one of them. 

=====
THINGS TO DO IF I BECOME AN EVIL OVERLORD #59
I will never build a sentient computer smarter than I am.

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