Re: why I object (was: Intentions of XMP)

Right, so telling them that they're all wrong will encourage
them to use RDF in the future. 

And what about those of us who want to extract the RDF
from millions or billions of PDF documents and have generic
RDF inference and query engines understand and respect
the intended meaning of those literals?

Having untidy semantics and using rdfs:range allows us to
express clearly *in* RDF the intended meaning of applications
such as XMP and CC/PP. To adopt tidy semantics is to
alienate such communities from the broader semantic web.

I find the tidy position to be in direct conflict with the goals of
the semantic web, amd motivated solely by the personal
short convenience of a few software tools developers. The
vast majority of RDF users, namely those expressing knowledge
in RDF, clearly prefer an untidy approach.

Patrick

_____________Original message ____________
Subject:	why I object (was: Intentions of XMP)
Sender:	ext Aaron Swartz <me@aaronsw.com>
Date:		Fri, 27 Sep 2002 08:11:58 +0300


An Adobe XMP developer wrote:
> We store as RDF because it works. We are not RDF theory centric. We 
> are not
> at all concerned with the formalisms of triples. The Adobe toolkit has 
> no
> notion of triples and tries to not explicitly expose RDF.

I believe this is the kind of reality this group needs to confront.

As long as we continue to throw more needless things into the core like 
this, we will confuse and alienate such key developers. If this working 
group wants RDF to be popular, it should focus on simplifying it rather 
than make it more complicated.

As XMP demonstrates, if apps want to do value-based comparisons, they 
will do so with or without a decision from us. Let's stop enforcing 
complexity on all for the benefit of few.

-- 
Aaron Swartz [http://www.aaronsw.com] RDF: Five years of failure.

Received on Friday, 27 September 2002 01:20:17 UTC