There has been some confusion on the part of some people who attended the
post DC-2001 AC meeting about what DCMI's position on RDF is or should be.
I wrote the following in response to a question about it, and thought I
might as well send it to the entire AC.
My view of the situation is as follows:
1. RDF is endorsed by the W3C as a basic building block of Semantic Web
efforts. Uptake of RDF continues to be slow, but there are encouraging
developments that should give us confidence that it will enjoy broader
adoption (the Adobe developments for example).
2. A substantial segment of the commercial and digital library community has
not been persuaded of the value of RDF over simpler solutions (either HTML
or XML schemas).
3. The position of DCMI has always been that, while we recognize that it is
essential to provide technical guidance on syntactical strategies, it is
equally important that we not tie the future of DC metadata to any
particular syntax.
4. Thus, the correct path for us is to provide documentation to our
community that supports all the various options: HTML, XML, and RDF/XML.
Personally I hope that there will soon be convergance as to the choice
between XML and RDF/XML. It would reduce the burden of supporting parallel
implementations. Still, until the marketplace has made such a choice clear,
I think we are obligated to provide the best advice we can about each of the
alternative encodings.
I hope this clears up any confusion.
stu
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