I would also commend Mark Butler's "Is the Semantic Web hype?" I am
glad that he has updated his slides since I read it a while back while
wrestling with the whole RDF vs XML question. I wrote up my thoughts on
my wiki: http://raymondyee.net/wiki/FiguringOutRdf I was specifically
wrestling with the question of whether RDF would help solve the problem
of interoperating among metadata specifications. For instance, if I
need to convert among between DC, MODS, and Amazon metadata; among
METS, IMS Content Packaging and MPEG 21-2; between Microsoft Office 2003
XML and OpenOffice.org XML, where can I use RDF? At that time I came
up with the following conclusions:
1. RDF is promising technology in spite of all the confusing hype
around it.
<http://raymondyee.net/wiki/FiguringOutRdf#head-7a56a0c9acfc4cf03e13f3d42abe4217a2a7680d>
2. RDF is not a monolithic topic. RDF can be used independently of
the Semantic Web. RDF is not inherently tied to XML.
<http://raymondyee.net/wiki/FiguringOutRdf#head-0b12fac5b2d167a2e309ef6b17022db0411b4abd>
3. The RDF triple concept is a simple, elegant, and seemingly
powerful one at its heart.
<http://raymondyee.net/wiki/FiguringOutRdf#head-14d3f31f28ce1e85ec8d227e6361260ba4c5156a>
4. RDF/XML is obscure to the uninitiated and makes it easy to confuse
the relationship between RDF and XML.
<http://raymondyee.net/wiki/FiguringOutRdf#head-5cbbccb786f28dc66d0366af41434ebda5b66461>
5. RDF Tools help a lot to make RDF understandable -- and usable.
<http://raymondyee.net/wiki/FiguringOutRdf#head-1c355d238224023dbda1ec0cf69b9d97672d151e>
6. RSS 1.0 is a good place to start with RDF.
<http://raymondyee.net/wiki/FiguringOutRdf#head-3b377cadb83e0a1ba967b1ae8ef300f506b915bf>
7. Non-hype filled assessments of RDF and the somewhat related
Semantic Web are hard to find.
<http://raymondyee.net/wiki/FiguringOutRdf#head-9e9164817176abc8dc33a178896a3d3ead22a053>
8. Blending RDF vocabularies is probably easier than blending XML
vocabularies but it's not magic either! Some human must do the
mapping of meanings between vocabularies.
<http://raymondyee.net/wiki/FiguringOutRdf#head-cc9ba9e4afc73ded97df0ff2b284b80fb313c41c>
9. Too much abstraction and confusion might kill off RDF.
<http://raymondyee.net/wiki/FiguringOutRdf#head-e91e319f33670a5bebb83775ed97ecc0d7423b53>
Not having taken a closer look since that time, I don't know whether I'd
stand by those conclusions today. I suspect that I would.
Bruce, have you tried the Piggy Bank 2 Firefox plugin-in? I think that
I will take a look at this time and suspect that it's a nice place to
get into both RDF and Firefox.
-Raymond
Bruce D'Arcus wrote:
>On 7/9/05, Houghton,Andrew <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>
>
>>There is an excellent presentation "Is the Semantic Web hype?" (7 March 2005) by Dr. Mark H. Butler of HP Labs Bristol Digital Media Systems Department.
>>
>>
>
>[...]
>
>Their conclusion is that RDF and XML are complementary technologies
>(though they're seeing XML as a source for RDF, via XSLT).
>
>Anyone that wants to play with an application of this (from SIMILE)
>should install the Piggy Bank 2 Firefox plug-in. They use a
>combination of XSLT and Javascript to massage web data into RDF, and
>then from there to do some magic with it.
>
>
--
--
Raymond Yee 2195 Hearst (250-22)
Technology Architect UC Berkeley
Interactive University Project Berkeley, CA 94720-3810
[log in to unmask] 510-642-0476 (work)
http://iu.berkeley.edu/rdhyee 413-541-5683 (fax)
