@Martynas, With XSLT are you talking about using XSLT to generate an XML/RDF document? Or punching in some UDFs that generate triples?
One advantage of the low-to-no-configuration route is that you can start doing SPARQL queries on the data on an exploratory basis without having to do much or any work on setting up a transformation. If you translate XML to RDF in a transparent way, you will also find that many of the pattern matching things you could do with XPath, XQuery or XSLT can be done in ways that are much more transparent with SPARQL, Jena rules, etc. XML has a quite a bit of funkiness in it that leads to non-essential complexity such as asymmetries in the handling of attributes and elements such as attributes almost always being the default namespace. Individually these are not so bad but when you add them up they introduce a large number of latent errors and cognitive load on the part of users and programmers. A big difference also has to do with the handling of ordering of things. For instance in an XML document the order of elements matters, whereas in RDF world the order of things doesn't matter unless you actually use the list constructions. Sometimes in the problem space the order does not matter and then the "order-matters" semantics implicit to XML leads to a conceptual gap that causes lots of little practical problems. With the "low-to-no-configuration" route you also can use one set of tools (SPARQL, Jena Rules) for XML, JSON, Relational, YAML, Stuff imported directly from Java, etc. My take is that programmers already need to learn too many things and know too many different tools and we are too proud to admit we have cognitive limits -- if we add RDF to a system we are adding the (unavoidable) bullshit that comes with RDF and unless we can subtract at least as much bullshit from the system from the benefits of RDF, RDF is part of the problem and not part of the solution. On Fri, Jul 29, 2016 at 4:06 PM, Martynas Jusevičius <[email protected]> wrote: > Hey, > > I am all for RDF conversion tools, but I think this would be much more > reusable and portable if done as an XSLT stylesheet -- and probably > more readable, too. > > I don't think there is a better tool than XSLT (2.0) when it comes to > XML conversion. > > On Fri, Jul 29, 2016 at 10:28 AM, Håvard Mikkelsen Ottestad > <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi, > > > > I just wanted to give some publicity to a library I have worked on for > some time. An XML to RDF Java library (open source / apache 2) that’s > compatible with Jena. > > > > It’s blazingly fast and highly configurable. Available on GitHub > https://github.com/AcandoNorway/XmlToRdf and on Maven > http://mvnrepository.com/artifact/no.acando/xmltordf > > > > Regards, > > Håvard M. Ottestad > -- Paul Houle *Applying Schemas for Natural Language Processing, Distributed Systems, Classification and Text Mining and Data Lakes* (607) 539 6254 paul.houle on Skype [email protected] :BaseKB -- Query Freebase Data With SPARQL http://basekb.com/gold/ Legal Entity Identifier Lookup https://legalentityidentifier.info/lei/lookup/ <http://legalentityidentifier.info/lei/lookup/> Join our Data Lakes group on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/grp/home?gid=8267275
