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Re: To RDF or not to RDF, that is the (perennial) question


To restate my point in your terms I believe I have shown that your point (4) is currently true. Ie (4) is not a future. It is currently and actually true.

Like RSS1.0 Atom is a constrained form of RDF. But unlike RSS1.0 it is very inconspicuously so. IE. Anyone just looking at atom would never guess that it is RDF.

I have tried to show this in an e-mail [1] to this list. Of course it would require more work to show this definitively to be the case. I have not gone through the details of this work because I'd like to have the backing of the group to do this officially, before I spend too much time on it. Also I would probably find a lot of people a lot more knowledgeable than me to help on this task if there was a declared interest.

Henry Story

[1] http://www.imc.org/atom-syntax/mail-archive/msg11850.html
I later found ways around most (all?) of the problems I had identified in that mail on the atom-owl mailing list.

On 6 Jan 2005, at 18:18, Antone Roundy wrote:

I see four possible futures:

1) Atom does not use RDF and is not defined and constrained in a way that makes it easy to convert to RDF (including elements from other namespaces). This would make Atom significantly less useful to those who care about RDF's benefits.

2) Atom does not use RDF, but it is defined and constrained in ways that make it easy to convert to RDF (including extensions). This should be at least minimally acceptable to pretty much everyone.

3) Atom uses RDF, adding a lot of syntactic overhead and/or variability to its structure. This would make Atom significantly less appealing to those who aren't conversant with RDF and/or using RDF-aware tools.

4) Atom uses RDF, but the way documents are structured is constrained to a subset of how RDF can be structured so that it doesn't require RDF-aware tools to process, and the amount of overhead added by the RDF syntax is minimal. This should be at least minimally acceptable to pretty much everyone.