Murray Spork wrote:
> I'm not sure there aren't significant benefits to be gained from
> combining RDF and XML Schemas. There was some talk a while ago on
> rdf-interest I remember about adorning schemas with RDF. I've found a
> paper [1] on this - but it's almost a year old now.
>
> Can anyone point me to any more recent work in this area? [I know it
> would be more appropriate to post this to rdf-interest - but
> seeing as
> it was raised here I thought I would try here first]
>
> [1] http://archive.dstc.edu.au/RDU/staff/jane-hunter/www10/paper.html
> "Combining RDF and XML Schemas to Enhance Interoperability Between
> Metadata Application Profiles"
Cool, they seem to be proposing almost exactly the same approach as I am.
Thanks for posting this. The only significant difference is that I would
prefer to see the RDF-type semantics (i.e. the ones that can't be expressed
using document schemas) in a separate annotation file, rather than embedded
in the schema. First of all, this divorces the information from the specific
(XML) schema syntax being used. Also, it is a cleaner and more modular
approach.
In general, I think that it makes a lot of sense to modularize the semantics
expressed in a document schema. In fact, XSD would have benefitted greatly
from this, since they could have created a core language for describing
document structure (which would have ended up looking a lot like RELAX NG,
at least in expressive power) and offloading all of the other gunk into
annotations that also use a standard syntax. As far as using little snippets
of RDF syntax inside the annotations, as the paper proposes... why not?
How come you don't see significant benefits in this? Why is it better to
create two separate schemas with significant overlap, and rob RDF-style
query engines of the semantics already in the document schema (or do hybrid
RDF/XSD parsers how exist?).
Matt
