Daniel’s Blog

Hi all,

This is just clearing up the misconceptions that Ben Werdmuller has written in his Guest Post on ZDnet titled “Guest post: Introducing the Open Data Definition”.

“The semantic web community has RDF, a format designed for the purpose that is potentially powerful but – as one might expect from the semantic web community – prone to ambiguity and overcomplicated implementation.”

Thats just a cheeky comment about the Semantic Web community! Anyway, I’ve already mentioned that RDF isn’t complicated at all in my Simple RDF blog post. Some of the commenter’s also explained it in their own way, and one commenter said that RDF is actually too simple! In the Semantic Web community; we aren’t some wacky bunch of academics, a lot of us are actually in business and actually implementing this stuff in real life (Companies such as Microsoft, Adobe, Sun Microsystems, OpenLink Software, Mozilla, Nokia, Skype, BBC, Joost and Oracle are all using RDF in one way or another)

“In small doses, it works (FOAF is based on a subset of RDF),”

FOAF is not a subset of RDF, it is a vocabulary. Just as XHTML is defined in an XML Schema, FOAF is defined in an RDF Schema.

“but for more abstract data, it becomes exponentially harder to build for.”

Thats actually rubbish. RDF was made to describe abstract and concrete data: “one persons data is another persons metadata”. There are also the RDF Schema and OWL frameworks if you need even more descriptions.

“Adding new data fields requires doing contortions in XML, which makes it harder to generate dynamically.”

Thats wrong in so many ways. RDF is NOT XML, therefore you don’t need to do “contortions in XML”. Plus RDF is dynamic when you use it as a distributed web language.

“RDF parsers are also not widely supported,”

There are a lot of RDF tools out there already, including parsers (take your pick from the many on the list).

“and it seems unlikely that most web coders would bother to read through the specification, let alone sit down and actually write compliant software.”

Coders don’t want to read any specifications, this shouldn’t be a comment specifically about RDF. There are lots of tutorials and frequently asked questions available about RDF, the Semantic Web and Linked Data… including my recent three blog posts:

• “RDF: Simpler if you look at it in a different way“
• “Linked Data are the roots of the Future Web“
• “Linked Data: The role of the data server“

Lets just repeat this again. RDF is not XML, and RDF is not a format. RDF is a linked object modeling framework for the emerging Web of Data. XML and N3 are formats which can show RDF. FOAF and SIOC are vocabularies of RDF, and are not subsets.

Seriously, if there are any questions then do ask… because nobody likes misconceptions/misunderstandings. We are friendly people in the Semantic Web community, feel free to email me, or if you don’t want to come to me then there is the Semantic Web IRC channel #swig on the freenode network.

Many thanks,

Daniel