[Zope-dev] RDF Musings and TinyTables

[Lukasz Racon]

> 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 is NOT just abstraction:)
The point is you can read RDF and understand it, and machine can understand
it too,
what makes Web a huge database (of course in future). Its not just HTML or
XML it is structured text, so for
example you can search web - based on logic (like searching in library
catalog), and not like to day - which is just matching words.
In other words now you have content, RDF gives you content and metadata
(content description).
Ontologies are next step which gives you relation between objects and so on.

>  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.
>

Semantic Web are based on RDF:
One path might be (not only one):
RDF -> DAML+OIL -> OIL -> Description Logics further for example FaCT -> ALC
and so on.

>
> 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.
>

1st idea:
    You can implement RDF almost in any SQL language, and be able to Query
rdfs.

2nd idea:
    Besides any document in ZOPE can be RDF - special tags in html-header.
    On the other hand Plone uses Dublin Core, so you can easily make RSS
(syndication), and RDF.
    But its limited to documents and basic Plone types.
    So you can, and Plone uses ZCatalog for searching

3rd idea:
    I haven't done research on RDF and Zope/Python, yet, but it seams to be
a good idea to do something like "RDFBucket" especialy using ZODB (maybe not
derivied from TinyTable).
    I also consider this idea but I would do it more like RDFS - Folder like
object with (rdf) properties containing other objects (subclasses). This is
about "5" minutes of programing.
    My consideration are going further - I'm thinking, about further
develepment of this idea into OIL, DAML compatibile (restrictions,
constraints),
    but I've to get check also OWL:)

>
> 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
>

Hope this gives you some light:)
    Lukasz