Contrarian
Danny Ayers has lots of links to the various posts on the “RDF crisis” point, and his own response in the post “Danny Ayers, Raw Blog : ยป Wrong heel“.
My personal view is that RDF doesn’t need simplifying; on the contrary, it needs to add some of the OWL complexity.
See, the real issue is not the RDF model or even the RDFS model. It’s that people haven’t transferred their existing skill sets over yet. Most of them are still thinking in XML terms rather than in triples.
My hypothesis is this: all RDF parsers need to understand OWL semantics. Sure, OWL came out of the AI space and was originally intended for formal ontology management. But at a far more practical level it’s a really useful way to model your RDF as objects.
If SPARQL is what makes RDF usable for the relational-oriented crowd, OWL is what makes RDF usable for the object-oriented set (bad pun intended). OWL lets you write constraints in terms of classes and properties; it gives you sophisticated query-by-example semantics, and if properly implemented it can deduce the existence of implicit relationships. When you’re working with OWL, you define classes, properties, and enumerations. While it doesn’t map *exactly* to true OO semantics, it certainly maps to very, very similar space - one that’s close enough for a native interface in most languages - mnot’s sparta is a great example of leveraging this (though it uses very few OWL constructs).
Of course, this adds a lot of complexity to the underlying parser. But my contention is that it actually simplifies things for users by giving them the chance to build up an RDF skill set and mapping well into their tool set.
September 21st, 2005 at 1:56 am
I agree with your point about skillsets. The same point applies to REST in my opinion; one need to ‘unlearn’ much of what they take as given about the technology they currently use to really Get It.
I wonder whether the software that implements OWL doesn’t exist as a (well-integrated) layer above the RDF parser though.
Note there is another library like sparta: rdfobj. http://map.wirelesslondon.info/docs/rdfobj.html
Nodel, which is built upon it, looks quite interesting as well. http://map.wirelesslondon.info/docs/nodel.html
“used to build web applications by defining an RDF schema of classes and properties, from which are inferred mappings to a web handler module for each class, HTML templates for different functions on the web handler, and optional python module to give all objects in a class extra functions.”