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ziggy (25)

ziggy
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Journal of ziggy (25)

Tuesday October 08, 2002
11:29 PM

RDF

[ #8258 ]
The W3C has been hocking RDF for about 4 years now. It's one of those Prolog-y type things that makes perfect sense to PhDs, but is impenetrable to Real People(tm).

There have been lots of attempts to rectify (reify?) this situation in the past. First, there was N3, an RDF syntax in plain text instead of XML. That was too difficult, so N3 was simplified and led to NTriples (the part of N3 that people actually used and had a chance to understand).

RDF is slowly catching on. Perhaps in a few thousand years, the number of adopters will increase to about 20.

The biggest problem is figuring out what the damn format is supposed to do. The latest answer? Explain it in Haiku.

At this rate, it's only a matter of time before someone discovers the RDF Recommendation in the original Klingon.


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  • Well, if you include RSS 1.0, there are a lot of adopters of RSS. Check out the RDF [w3.org] validator, and paste http://use.perl.org/useperl.rss or http://slashdot.org/slashdot.rss into the URI field. See the pretty graph.

    • RSS is a very simple application of RDF in an easy-to-understand domain.

      RDF in all its glory is designed so that machine reasoning (er, AI) is possible on the web. RSS does little more than say "here is a list of links", and "someone named 'pudge' wrote the article that lives at the other end of this link."

      RSS is growing beyond the original "here's 10 links" format, mostly because of it's use of RDF. But RSS remains a very simple application of RDF.

      • Sure, it's simple, but as you point out, it is making RSS far more useful. And giving RDF far more visibility.
        • And I do believe that His Daveness [scripting.com] will be eradicating RDF from RSS 3D or whatever he's calling the new version. Or is it only namespaces he's removing? Or is he actually leaving both in but just kvetching about both? Ah, to find someone who cares.

          --Nat

          • He is trying to leave namespaces in, though he doesn't really understand them, and a bug in the RSS 2.0 spec broke some parsers that did respect namespaces. RDF is not in RSS 2.0. But I don't believe in RSS 2.0. It doesn't really exist.
          • Both His Daveness [inspiredsites.net] and RSS 2.0 are completely irrelevant. (Trying to follow that tempest in a dozen weblogs and mailing lists wasted more time than I care to consider.)

            RDF and RSS have always been intertwined, regardless of what Dave or any other revisionist historian wants you to believe.

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