Re: [Zope-dev] RDF Musings and TinyTables

[Shane Hathaway]

Lukasz Racon wrote:

I just read the RDF article published here:

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/02/12/rdflib.html

I've understood the mechanics of RDF for a while, but never understood
what makes it better than what we already have.  Now I think I get it:
RDF theory is a new kind of database abstraction.

It is NOT just abstraction:)
The point is you can read RDF and understand it, and machine can understand
it too,
what makes Web a huge database (of course in future). Its not just HTML or
XML it is structured text, so for
example you can search web - based on logic (like searching in library
catalog), and not like to day - which is just matching words.
In other words now you have content, RDF gives you content and metadata
(content description).
Ontologies are next step which gives you relation between objects and so on.

That's all fine and good, but I'd like someone to confirm my thinking: that the *core principle* of RDF is a new database abstraction. I believe that all the other concepts derive from this core principle.

It's similar to a
relational database in that you put pieces of data into the database and
later search for data.  But it's much more ad-hoc than a relational
database.

Serialization of RDF into XML and the relationship between RDF and the
Semantic Web are distinct concepts from RDF theory.

Semantic Web are based on RDF:
One path might be (not only one):
RDF -> DAML+OIL -> OIL -> Description Logics further for example FaCT -> ALC
and so on.

Please don't use so many new acronyms. DAML and OIL are weird enough. FaCT? ALC? I have no idea what you just suggested. :-)

This ad-hoc data storage made me think of TinyTables.  TinyTables is a
good Zope product that fills the need for simple tables of data, but it
needs attention.  What if it got replaced by some Zope product called
"RDFBucket"?  An RDFBucket object would let you input data in a variety
of ways, including object introspection, forms, and XML with embedded
RDF.  It would let you run queries similar to ZCatalog.  Maybe it would
also generate RDF for embedding metadata in web pages.

1st idea:
    You can implement RDF almost in any SQL language, and be able to Query
rdfs.

What does that mean? Do you mean that an RDF database could have a SQL query interface?

3rd idea:
    I haven't done research on RDF and Zope/Python, yet, but it seams to be
a good idea to do something like "RDFBucket" especialy using ZODB (maybe not
derivied from TinyTable).

I will not derive anything from TinyTable.  That would not be pretty.

    I also consider this idea but I would do it more like RDFS - Folder like
object with (rdf) properties containing other objects (subclasses). This is
about "5" minutes of programing.

I don't know what you're suggesting.

Hope this gives you some light:)

Right now, I'm looking for milk, not meat. :-)

Shane


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