Well, I am revisiting RDF and I think I may have been influenced unduly by
the fear of an "RDF complexity tax" which, as you say, is probably
overstated.
Now I need to figure out how I can allow for the possibility of semantics
changing in the lifecycle (or use case) of an entry in my system. For
instance, I may want to export a collection 'encoded' as Dublin Core,
MODS, VRA Core, Atom, etc. In the library world thay call them
"crosswalks" that establish equivalences between different metadata
schemas. My thought is that Atom provides the best and most widely used
"lowest common denominator". I think that some RDF in the <atom:content>
may be just the trick. And I am guessing that if I use RDF intelligently
I might be able to 'dereference' a piece of metadata as its equivalence in
whatever schema context pertains to that particular dereferencing
operation. In other words, I want to set up a (potentially dynamic)
one-to-many relationship with a 'key' and it's equivalence out there in
the wider information ecosystem.
While it may seem a bit crazy, the use case is quite simple: faculty
members needing to organize their digital 'stuff' have resorted to
FileMaker (mixes presentation w/ semantics and is remarkably difficult to
repurpose) or Excel Spreadsheets (often a nice and easily re-purposeable
format, but almost always includes unwise attempts at repeatable fields).
I am simply looking to (and have succeeded at) rationalizing the whole
mess, at least here at UT Austin, and now seek to rationalize things in a
larger context.
thanks-
Peter Keane
daseproject.org
On Sat, 6 Oct 2007, Brendan Taylor wrote:
On Fri, Oct 05, 2007 at 11:50:36PM -0500, pkeane wrote:
I don't really need/want the complexity of RDF and I certainly do not want
to try to explain such a thing to a not-particularly-technology-saavy
faculty member that I am trying to persuade NOT to simply build another
Filemaker database!
The complexity of RDF is vastly overstated; as Aristotle said, your
homegrown XML is practically RDF already.
