Re: why RDF?

Niyati Sompura wrote:
> hi all,
> I am new to RDF.
> Why Mozilla is using RDF extensively?
> Why not just XML?
> I would be thankful to you if you can give me some idea about the need 
> of RDF.
>  
> Thanks in advance
> niyati

I'm not from mozilla, and these are my opinions. I'm not involved in the 
developpement of any of the mozilla softwares... But here why I would 
have choosen RDF and not XML.

RDF is based and a very simple paradigm (collection of triples). This 
paradigm helps building any sorts of graph. Graph representation are far 
more flexible than XML that just set a lot of rules and nodes. XML draws 
with him his structure (attributes, nodes ... ) which is another layer 
upon your structure.

Of course you can describe graphs in XML, or in nearly any other type of 
datasource. But you'll have to "trick" the inner structure of the 
datasource, your code will have to abstract this inner structure to give 
a blind access to all the graphs functionnality.

RDF in its idea is graph Layer. In fact comparing RDF to XML isn't 
correct, as RDF is one layer of abstraction upper : RDF can be stored in 
XML (and is in fact quite often... look your contents.rdf in firefox 
chrome sub-directories), or in MySQL...

RDF powers lies in the fact that it can express naturally any type of 
data. This can be XML, SQL tables, LDAP, folders and files in a 
filesystem... . You can use them without any overhead due to a specific 
paradigm. RDF is the minimal (well there's some smaller subset that have 
the same power I think) structure you need conceptually to build any 
sort of data.

RDF is much more simple than XML to understand. And much more near our 
human conception of things.

Each triple can be concidered as a "statement". These statement 
describes your database, but also can be used through inference 
mechanism to deduce other statements. Rules for infering statements can 
be stored in RDF also. This gives a incredible power of reasoning if you 
have a good infer engine.

I'm not a good programmer, and I might have written some incorrect 
things in this post, but I feel that RDF (well the idea lying in this) 
is the future of computer science, and that this won't take long to 
become reality. (look at inference and RDF, ontology, semantics...)

Sorry for mistakes,

Valentin