On Fri, 24 Apr 1998, Dan Brickley wrote:
> daunting complexities found in other languages like KIF or CycL. While RDF
> is certainly not the last word in knowledge representation, it should
> hopefully be enough to meet many of the requirements of the digital
> libraries / metadata community.
I think it would be helpful to outline some of the benefits that RDF
offers for 'users' whether service providers or searchers. And to
acknowledge that RDF is not proven technology, it is at the research
stage. Note the recommendation at the start of the W3C specs that 'only
experimental software be implemented to this document', it is very much
work in progress.
Some quick thoughts on benefits for 'resource operators' (service
providers ... what shall we call them??):
The most obvious benefit RDF promises is a 'standard' syntax for
describing web resources which can be co-located with the resource. This
will make creating and gathering simple metadata created at source
easier. This means it will be easier to create viable products for
metadata creation.
RDF also allows metadata to be located remotely from that resource. This
enables creation of new sorts of metadata (for collections, images
etc). It also offers the opportunity for third parties to build up
collections of metadata referenced from the resources that sit on remote
web sites.
Further down the line RDF offers more. It will allow reference from
metadata to registries, which might or might not be stored as RDF schemas.
We might see registries of metadata sets (schemas)
which provide authoritative versions of metadata formats,
definitions of elements, allowed schemes, mappings between formats. This
might aid validation at the metadata creation stage and the ability to
automatically update collections of metadata.
(For those interested in this area I recommend Andrew Layman's paper to
WWW7 'Specifying metadata standards for metadata tool configuration'
available at following URL til the end of May
URL: http://www7.conf.au/programme/fullpapers/1913/com1913.htm
Well that is my understanding of RDF :-)
Rachel
ps Renato Iannella is leading seminar on RDF in Bath on May 8th, see
previous mail Apr 23 from Hazel Gott on lis-elib 'RDF: What's it all
about?'
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Rachel Heery
UKOLN (UK Office for Library and Information Networking)
University of Bath tel: +44 (0)1225 826724
Bath, BA2 7AY, UK fax: +44 (0)1225 826838
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/
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