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

[Paul Hoffman / IMC <phoffman@xxxxxxx>]

At 6:43 PM +0100 1/6/05, Henry Story wrote:
> 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.

Wearing my co-chair hat, the reason I didn't give backing is that I 
didn't hear much desire for it. That is not to say you shouldn't do 
it, just that it was not needed to be a WG work item.

It is quite common in the IETF that there are set of WG work items 
*and* individually-submitted drafts that extend, explain, or 
otherwise refer to the WG work items. If you wanted to create a draft 
that would eventually become an Informational RFC that explained how 
the Atom format as we are discussing it relates to RDF, I'm sure that 
would be useful to some people (and possibly many more than we can 
imagine right now).

So, instead of me saying "feel free to do it", let me encourage you 
to do it. It doesn't affect the WG products or timelines, but could 
have a positive effect of eventual Atom use.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium