RE: RDF Description Services - and WebDAV

A few of you (you know who you are!) replied offlist to my previous
message on WebDav. Fwded below is one of my offlist replies; rather than
reply similarly to each of the other folks who wrote direct back to me
I've only time in next few days to send this one quick message to the
list.

I was asked by a few people what exactly needs doing. In brief, I think we
need a comparison of the metadata / property models of RDF and WebDAV to
be written down for discussion. I suspect one way to achieve this is for
the few of you with experience of both RDF and WebDAV (however
sketchy!) to send a quick mesg to the list. Then someone (possibly but
hopefully not me ;-) can summarise and we can start to pull together a doc
that might usefully be sent to the webdav list for discussion.

Dan


---------- Forwarded message ----------

There are a number of things that need addressing. I'm on the WebDAV list
and try to keep up with the broad drift of things, but lack concrete
understanding of the spec. With another hat on I co-edit the Dublin Core
in RDF draft (http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/resources/dc/datamodel/WD-dc-rdf/) and
had some minimal contact with WebDAV folks about reflecting this into the
WebDAV property model. Facilitating the representation of RDF vocabularies
within WebDAV, and WebDAV properties within RDF query systems seems a
useful target. 

As I understand things, WebDAV say that objects have URI-namable
properties whose values may be simple strings or blobs of structured XML,
whereas RDF says that objects have URI-namable properties whose values may
be simple strings or other URI-named objects. The models feel close but
different.

What I'd hope for initially would be a short document that
compared/contrasted the WebDAV and RDF approaches to describing the
properties of Web resources. I suspect there may be some philosophical
differences relating to the question of whether a 'resource' has one or
multiple URIs for example, but without re-reading WebDAV I'm guessing.

So -- does this sound feasible? A 'compare and contrast: RDF and WebDAV
Property Models' document for discussion across both groups?

Received on Saturday, 11 December 1999 00:04:37 UTC