The recent "what's wrong with RDF?" discussion has been highly enlightening watching from the sidelines. It clarified some of the issues RDF has yet to address adequately and put other aspects into perspective for me.
Over at O'Reilly, Simon St. Laurent follows my summary with "What's right with RDF" where he writes "RDF is excellent at addressing a particular set of problems. The Resource Description Framework's primary approach is description. XML often presents something (a document, a table) directly; RDF more typically presents a description of something, not the thing itself. For some applications - like metadata and ontology development - this approach fits beautifully with the problem set." He continues "if RDF fits your problem set, run with it. If it doesn't fit, fight it - for that problem set. We're not all going to be happy all of the time, but RDF's strengths should not be forgotten in the arguing."
Also over at O'Reilly, Kendall Grant Clark reviews Tim Bray's proposal for an alternate RDF/XML serialization, called RPV, that is unambiguous and highly human-readable. The goal of RPV is not to support the full RDF specification, but rather the most common elements. Bray explained, "What RDF needs is the equivalent of XML, a brutal reduction (at least at the syntax level) that hits 80/20 points and anybody can figure out in 15 minutes by looking at it." He continued "I'm not saying RPV is the way to go, it's just a challenge: it proves that you there is a way to encode resource/property/value triples in XML that is human-readable and human-writeable."
Shelley Powers makes some final clarifications on her comments during the debate.
...I do not discount the complexity and difficulty inherent with RDF. I am aware, all too aware, of how complex the RDF Model documents can be. I know that there is much of the lab and not enough of the real world associated with the effort. And I'm not trying to dismiss people's concerns with the model or the RDF/XML serialization when I say that we need to release the RDF specification rather than start over.
When I say that I don't have problems with the RDF/XML, people should be aware that this is because I spent an enormous amount of time with the RDF specifications learning the core of the RDF model. I then spent a considerable amount of time learning how RDF is serialized with RDF/XML. I will now spend a significant amount of time reading through the newly released specifications to see where my understanding differs from the newest releases.
All of this has taken time and effort. I do not deny this.
I sincerely appreciate Shelley's honesty, effort, patience and passion in this recent debate. My personal encounters with RDF advocates/experts have been lacking and generally unsatisfactory. They've lacked a sense of clarity or acknowledge the realities of the "real world." Shelley' comments provided the perspective and sense of mutual understanding I wish most of the RDF community would exercise. (I don't hold this again RDF though.)
Shelley writes "...I'm not speaking for the RDF Working Group, in any way. I am giving my own viewpoints and opinions, which the WG may not agree with. No one can speak for the WG members, but they, themselves."
I wish Shelley did speak for the RDF workgroup. I found it rather odd, almost disconcerting, during the whole affair that few (any?) member of the RDF working group got involved. I would feel even better about this recent discussion hearing their viewpoints and knowing they are listening and have taken heed.
Commenting on Shelley's post Simon St. Laurent writes:
Thanks, Shelley.
You've brought some really difficult issues to a much broader group of people than the usual suspects, and I'm hoping that we'll see some interesting results over the next few months as people think about the questions you and other participants in the discussion have raised.
I doubt we'll all be living in peace and harmony by then, but we might at least have a better perspective on what we all see going on with these technologies.
I agree.
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