Hi, PlanetRDF!
Dave Beckett has looked over my RDF data and kindly chosen to add me to the list of semantic bloggers. This is very, very cool since I read Planet RDF on a daily basis.
I’ve been working with XML since the spec was released and have recently become an RDF convert. For the longest time I was completely put off by both the unreadability of the specs and the hideous, hideous serialization format. Thankfully, OWL came along with a readable document that built on RDF, and I found a little python module called sparta that made the scales fall from my eyes.
My version of the RDF elephant is quite simple - it is a distributed form of XML. I know that’s an oversimplification on many levels, but it also makes it really easy to make the transition from producing pure XML to producing ‘dumb’ RDF - that is, pure data just below the semantic layer. Thanks to its distributed nature, some of you smart folks can produce ontologies, triple stores, and inference engines.
Anyway, for the next few weeks I’ll keep working on my series on refactoring XML to RDF.