Short Essay: Squeezing RDF into a Java Object Model

[Paul Prescod]

Tim Bray wrote:
> 
> Perhaps the key is that I'm not trying to construct a comprehensive
> object model - I'm just trying to use metadata to look things up.
> I find RDF just fine for that.  -Tim

But if it isn't possible to build a generic RDF engine then what benefit
are you getting from using RDF and not some proprietary encoding of the
information? David is trying to scope out what it means to write an RDF
engine: in other words what it means to achieve some economies of scale in
RDF software development.

What you seem to be saying here is analogous to: "SGML isn't too difficult
to implement. I made a tags and attributes language that looks like SGML
and can be expressed as an SGML subset. I wrote a parser in an afternoon
so SGML obviously isn't too difficult to implement."

As long as everyone writes their own engines for their own document types,
nobody is gaining any benefit from the standardization.

-- 
 Paul Prescod  - ISOGEN Consulting Engineer speaking for only himself
 http://itrc.uwaterloo.ca/~papresco

Alabama's constitution is 100 years old, 300 pages long and has more than
600 amendments. Highlights include "Amendment 393: Amendment of Amendment
No.  351", "Validation of Laws Regulating Court Costs in Randolph County",
"Miscegenation laws", "Bingo Games in Russell County", "Suppression
of dueling".  - http://www.legislature.state.al.us/ALISHome.html


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