[Rets-dev] Comments on RQL, SQL, XPath and Joins, Why not RDF/OWL?

[Matt Lavallee]

While it’s all well and good to consider emerging technology, it’s notable that
RDF had been formally accepted in 2004 and has yet to see any mainstream
adoption. Beyond it’s (in my opinion) excessively verbose syntax, it provides no
direction to structuring our data and is only arguably useful in meta-meta-data
scenarios.  Consider this example:

http://www.daml.org/cgi-bin/hyperdaml?http://www.daml.org/2001/10/html/airport-o
nt#Airport

 

…the ability to validate the document (not to mention infer any sense of
hierarchy) is fairly limited, and may not be applicable at all in an
infinitely-extensible model such as ours.

 

SPARQL is equally overburdened with complex syntax due to the URI-based
nomenclature of RDF.  If one compares the “suggested Extended RQL” to SPARQL, I
don’t think there’s much debate.  SPARQL requires you to construct the element
graph in the query and employs its own unique filter language for criteria.  At
least our [suggested] form follows SQL for semantic construct, then XPath for
element notation.

 

-Matt

 

From: rets-dev-bounces at rets.org [mailto:rets-dev-bounces at rets.org] On Behalf Of
Jery Cook
Sent: Monday, July 09, 2007 3:07 PM
To: 'Jery Cook'; jbrush at ronintech.org; 'E-mail Rets-Dev'
Subject: RE: [Rets-dev] Comments on RQL, SQL, XPath and Joins, Why not RDF/OWL?

 


W3C Recommendations: Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Web Ontology
Language (OWL).

The World Wide Web Consortium has announced "final approval of two key Semantic
Web technologies, the revised Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the Web
Ontology Language (OWL). RDF and OWL are Semantic Web standards that provide a
framework for asset management, enterprise integration and the sharing and reuse
of data on the Web. These standard formats for data sharing span application,
enterprise, and community boundaries, since different types of users can share
the same information even if they don't share the same software."

The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a "language for representing
information about resources in the World Wide Web. It is particularly intended
for representing metadata about Web resources, such as the title, author, and
modification date of a Web page, copyright and licensing information about a Web
document, or the availability schedule for some shared resource. However, by
generalizing the concept of a 'Web resource', RDF can also be used to represent
information about things that can be identified on the Web, even when they
cannot be directly retrieved on the Web. Examples include information about
items available from on-line shopping facilities (e.g., information about
specifications, prices, and availability), or the description of a Web user's
preferences for information delivery." The W3C RDF Recommendation is presented
six parts: Primer, Concepts, Syntax, Semantics, Vocabulary, and Test Cases.

The OWL Web Ontology Language is "intended to be used when the information
contained in documents needs to be processed by applications, as opposed to
situations where the content only needs to be presented to humans. OWL can be
used to explicitly represent the meaning of terms in vocabularies and the
relationships between those terms. This representation of terms and their
interrelationships is called an ontology. OWL has more facilities for expressing
meaning and semantics than XML, RDF, and RDF-S, and thus OWL goes beyond these
languages in its ability to represent machine interpretable content on the Web.
OWL is a revision of the DAML+OIL web ontology language incorporating lessons
learned from the design and application of DAML+OIL." W3C has published the OWL
Recommendation in six documents: Use Cases, Overview, Guide, Language Reference,
Test Cases, and Language Semantics and Abstract Syntax.

Sounds like a perfect match for Rets to me.

 

Jeryl Cook

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