Hi Shane In case your not aware Chandler OSAfoundation is basing their new PIM on RDF/ZODB/Python etc... if you haven't already it might be worth having a look at how they see RDF fitting into the picture. http://www.osafoundation.org/Chandler_rel._0.1.htm See ya Tim On Wed, 2003-02-19 at 03:21, Shane Hathaway wrote:
I just read the RDF article published here:
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/02/12/rdflib.html
I've understood the mechanics of RDF for a while, but never understood what makes it better than what we already have. Now I think I get it: RDF theory is a new kind of database abstraction. It's similar to a relational database in that you put pieces of data into the database and later search for data. But it's much more ad-hoc than a relational database.
Serialization of RDF into XML and the relationship between RDF and the Semantic Web are distinct concepts from RDF theory.
This ad-hoc data storage made me think of TinyTables. TinyTables is a good Zope product that fills the need for simple tables of data, but it needs attention. What if it got replaced by some Zope product called "RDFBucket"? An RDFBucket object would let you input data in a variety of ways, including object introspection, forms, and XML with embedded RDF. It would let you run queries similar to ZCatalog. Maybe it would also generate RDF for embedding metadata in web pages.
I'm wondering if I'm thinking in line with RDF theory, or if I've veered off track. If you're familiar with RDF: What do you think?
Shane
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