But sometimes the quote isn’t enough.
Sometimes, however, it is.
Other times, a link to the origin is enough.
PS: Should you, at some point over the next week or so, no longer be able to reach this or adjacent sites — don’t worry, it’s temporary due to a relocation, but it might last for a few weeks.
Over the last week, Planet RDF has seen more than a few posts and comments on the RDF/XML serialisation syntax, most of them looking into its (almost not enumerable) possible variations.
Danny Ayers has a great overview with reference to the expectations, not an unimportant point — as my boss always tells me: It’s all about controlling expectations.
All in all, I agree with most of the comments on the subject, even parts of the ones that don’t seem to agree with each other.
In short: RDF/XML is just a syntax (it’s the RDF model that counts), and while I generally find it acceptable, the variation is one aspect I hope I would have done different had I been involved. That would make it more accessible to XML tools such as XSLT, leading to easier ways of generating clean XML for other uses.
The subject of RDF/XML variation is as close to being a permathread as it can be, and I’ve participated before myself, mostly with regard to the R3X syntax subset. I’ve been doing a lot of XSLT as well, and three recommendations come to mind when considering a syntactic profile or subset of RDF/XML, to reduce the variation:
<foaf:Person>...</foaf:Person> than <rdf:Description><rdf:type rdf:resource="&foaf;Person"/>...</rdf:Description>, it makes it much harder to deal with nodes that have multiple types (and using named entities can help a lot too).That said, I don’t consider the deficiencies of RDF/XML to be serious enough to warrant a new XML syntax — after all, there are plenty of RDF/XML parsers out there by now, and the real challenges lies elsewhere (see: Crisis, LargeTripleStores, and Tagtriples + identity precision).
Things haven’t been less hectic since my last progress report — I’m now officially entitled to the title “Uncle”, as my sister yesterday finally gave birth to Silke, her lovely daughter and my wonderful niece:
To top it off, (Aunt) Katrine’s brother and his wife came home from China tonight, bringing with them their new daughter Isabel, just as lovely and wonderful:
In other news, Katrine and I entered the bubbly housing market — we bought a house on Lellinge Allé, just outside central Copenhagen. We will be moving after October 1st, after which you’ll all be more than welcome to stop by! :-)
Elsewhere, Katrina is in the news and photo streams, and Tim Bray’s retrospect about Nawlins reminded me of when I was there, specifically of when I was walking down Basin Street and got “hustled” by a guy who claimed to be able to tell “where I got my shoes” for $10. Since I brought them from Denmark, I figured I’d be safe accepting the challenge, but he simply replied “On your feet”. Laughing hard, I just had to fork it over.
ObSemWeb: Prompted by Danny Ayers, I finally got around to releasing a new version of the FOAF Output plugin. It’s now at 1.17, with a few fixes and tweaks added since the last release (but still not tested with WP 1.5 and later).
The last months have been quite different from the previous ones.
A few data points:
Makes me wonder what’s ahead…
Joining the Planet RDF meme du jour: Redland turned five years old today, and while arguably still a toddler, it’s one of the most mature RDF libraries out there — thanks Dave!
Also thanks for letting me join in on the hacking, it’s been quite an interesting ride with the MySQL backend, and I’m looking forward to trying to keep pace with the rest of Redland’s progress, and to see what lies ahead.
Congrats!