Re: AtomOWL & AtomIsRDF

[Dan Brickley <danbri@xxxxxx>]

* Henry Story <henry.story@xxxxxxxxxxx> [2005-01-17 16:12+0100]
> 
> I have put up two pages (Paces) on the wiki.
> 
> One AtomOWL [1] just is a place to work on the latest RDF model of 
> Atom, and fulfill
> the requirement that Atom have a model.
> 
> The Other AtomIsRDF [2] is a place to track the way for Atom to fulfill 
> its extensibility requirements, by closing the gap with RDF. As you 
> will see there
> is not a lot of difference really. So this should harm no one, but make 
> it much easier to extend atom in a failsafe way.
 
I fear [2] is unfortunately named. Atom is RDF-like in some ways, 
but until the Atom spec says "Atom is RDF", Atom isn't RDF. A surface 
similarity to RDF's XML encoding, or even to RDF's graph data model,
isn't by itself enough to declare that Atom "is" RDF. For example, there 
have been threads here about defaulting, about data being implied if
missing, and other things that have no clear RDF equivalent. The name 
"Atom is RDF" goes somewhat against the decision record of this group,
which has been pretty clear in its non-RDFness. Wiki style tends towards 
the consensual, so I suggest renaming it to AtomRDF or similar.

Even as an RDF enthusiast, I find the name problematic. So I'm concerned
that "Atom is RDF" will annoy people needlessly, which would be a shame 
since the work you've been doing on an RDF/OWL view of the Atom format 
is both interesting and valuable.

Dan

> Henry Story
> 
> [1] http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/AtomOWL
> [2] http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/AtomIsRDF