On Fri, 31 Jul 1998, Matthew Dovey wrote:
> This comment was based upon various remarks Dan Brickley made at the RDF
> - What's it all about event in Bath earlier this year.
>
> Matthew
Oh dear, what did I say this time?
> > ... Within RDF
> > it is hoped to use this sort of construct to enable a standardise
> > protocol for searching for information on the web. At this point it
> > begins to overlap with some of the objectives of Z39.50 (e.g.
> > searching catalogue level descriptions or EAD records).
Yep. This is definitely true.
The RDF model is relevant to any sort of resources that can be given a URI
identifier (URL, URN etc...). These needn't be Web pages: books, people
etc can in principle be picked out by URI. So a general purpose interface
to an RDF database won't case what type of resource descriptions are in
there. This means that an RDF search system might[...] let you ask it for,
say, the identifiers for all resources that had an RDF:instanceOf property
with value MODELS:Z3950Server and a ROADS:Keywords property with value
matching the string "social science". In other words, you'd be saying
"tell me the address of Z3950 servers that have 'social science' keyword
field". But you might equally well ask it for people or web pages.
The database itself wouldn't particularly care whether it was storing
information about searchable resources, single PDF files, or about other
RDF repositories of information (analogy with the ROADS index-server
network here, where collaborating servers have forward knowledge about
each others' contents).
That said, I'm pretty sure we don't need anything this fancy to deliver
95% of what the eLib user community need on the distributed searching
front (browsing being another matter entirely). Boring simple WHOIS++ does
the job fine, as does Z39.50 once you've spent 2 years agreeing record
formats, compliance levels and bolting on WHOIS++ derrived query routing
facilities for distributed searching. But then it takes all sorts...
RDF is certainly worth watching, but I wouldn't switch off your WHOIS++
servers just yet.
Dan
ps. FWIW Netscape 4.5 (now shipping) includes a simple RDF query protocol
to support their "What's related" feature.
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