Re: Can RDFa be used on XML: pharma information

[Matthias Samwald]

Hi Rick,

So there is still no convenient way to mark up existing XML as RDF?  It 
was a showstopper 10 years ago but I kind of expected there would have
been some progress

I rather think that using XML as the default representation for RDF was the 
showstopper back then. RDF/XML is not a good serialisation for RDF, Turtle 
and N-Triples would have been a much better choice in comparison. I guess 
the choice for RDF/XML was made for diplomatic reasons (not basing any kind 
of new data standard on XML was unthinkable at that time), rather than 
practicality.

(Like I said, it has different info from the HTML so adding RDFa to the 
HTML won't work; also the XML has existing customers so we don't want to 
alter that, though the idea of duplicating the XML data as RDF seems 
workable but a terrible hack; and we want to avoid having a new datafeed.)

So you do not want to alter the XML in a substantial way, and neither want 
to create a RDF representation out of the XML via some kind of 
transformation? I am afraid that solving you problem is not possible under 
these constraints.

Cheers,
Matthias Samwald

DERI Galway, Ireland
http://deri.ie/

Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution & Cognition Research, Austria
http://kli.ac.at/