[Zope-dev] RDF Musings and TinyTables

[Shane Hathaway]

Lukasz Racon 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 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.

That's all fine and good, but I'd like someone to confirm my thinking: 
that the *core principle* of RDF is a new database abstraction.  I 
believe that all the other concepts derive from this core principle.

>> 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.

Please don't use so many new acronyms.  DAML and OIL are weird enough. 
FaCT?  ALC?  I have no idea what you just suggested. :-)

>>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.

What does that mean?  Do you mean that an RDF database could have a SQL 
query interface?

> 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 will not derive anything from TinyTable.  That would not be pretty.

>     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.

I don't know what you're suggesting.

> Hope this gives you some light:)

Right now, I'm looking for milk, not meat. :-)

Shane