Re: It's all about the DAV, baby! [Tim's WWW8 Keynote]

Dan Brickley (Daniel.Brickley@Bristol.ac.uk)
Wed, 12 May 1999 22:01:41 +0100 (BST)


On Wed, 12 May 1999, Rohit Khare wrote:
[snip]
> + Mike Spreitzer asked a closing question on the diversity of data
> models: RDF isn't enough/ A: RDF is enough; it's purely low-level.
> Tim likened it to OO typing and the debate over inheritance and
> multiple inheritance, but RDF has a generic constraint mechanism. If
> you find the document hard to read, it's because the experts have
> gone down very deep and tried to describe every case, a big effort."

Nope; it's because the (RDF Schema) document does a bad job of
presenting some fairly simple ideas. Not that the technical content is
bad, but it lacks a high level overview of what it's setting out to
achieve and how it fits into the broader web architecture...

> [No, Tim, it's a flashing red siren warning of precisely what Mike
> raised -- the world won't "map everything to RDF" if they don't
> understand it! Ora and I and Ralph actually commiserated about the
> difficulty of our very different RDF tutorials -- not a great sign:
> that there's no educational silver bullet there]

Yep; Fair point. The closest thing I've seen to a silver bullet for
explaining this sort of thing is Tim Bray's stuff for MCF, esp:

http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-MCF-XML/simple.gif
or http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-MCF-XML/MCF-tutorial.html

Dan