On 9 Jul 2006, at 02:15, Bill de hÓra wrote:
Henry Story wrote:
But there is one thing that I will say, knowingly speaking to a
deaf audience on this list. If you were to use RDF your life would
be soo much simpler.
I think if you were to stop using RDF, your life would be so much
simpler*.
RDF on the web has failed.
Not at all. The biggest xml data experiment on the web that chose xml
is failing: SOAP. [0]
And that is because just as with this group every time you come up
with a new problem, you need to invent a new format. And this is just
going to get exponentially more complicated. Just like Pre-Copernican
Astronomy really. [1] So this group is meant to discuss a protocol,
but you already need two extra formats. Every extension this group
comes up with will be described in some format document that is
difficult to write, to read, to extend and to understand. Of course
some people might think this complexity will give them a job for life.
So for example to deal with the problem of APPCategories you need to
come up with a format. With RDF you would not even need to come up
with a new vocabulary. I can use AtomOwl [4] to describe exactly an
atom document and a categories document too. So here is a categories
document in N3, (there are xml serialisations too for point bracket
worshippers), with 2 categories.
[ a :Category;
:scheme "http://eg.com/cat/";;
:label "philosophy";
:term "humanities/philosophy"
].
[ a :Category;
:scheme "http://eg.com/cat/";;
:label "blogging";
:term "technologies/publishing"
].
Hey. If I have a Categories document that is too long, I can use the
next, previous, first and last relationship we use in atom here too!
No problem. I don't even really need to specify it. (One may just
wish to specify the type of information to be found at a resource,
that is all)
I don't need to mistake mime types for data formats. Atom does hardly
anything and yet it has to invent a new mime type!
But as Kuhn [2] and Feyerabend [3] have very well argued, these types
of debates are not won through argument. People work within paradigms
that forge their vision of the world. So that counterexamples will
always be pushed aside.
Henry
cheers
Bill
* But of course, you're not /really/ using it.
BlogEd, which I completed in a simple form a year ago, is using it.
[0] Everything to do with xml and markup on the other hand is a great
success: html, office formats, etc
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolaus_Copernicus
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Samuel_Kuhn
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Feyerabend
[4] http://bblfish.net/work/atom-owl/2006-06-06/
