Valentin's Blog

More or less all people with less than a year of Semantic Web experience misunderstand RDF(S). They try to say something like that an animal can have an attribute number_of_legs of type (positive) integer and end up saying something like that everything that has a positive number of legs is of type animal. The common response to such mistakes is to lecture them about logics, the open world assumption and about open architecture - when it should be to go and design a schema language that conforms to their expectations. I'm not saying that RDF(S) should be discarded, but that there is a clear need for another language, an RDF DTD, that allows to restrict what an RDF document should look like. In a future of automatic interoperability through formalized background knowledge this may not be needed; but with the current state of the Semantic Web where almost all applications rely on RDF data to conform to some schema in this DTD sense - such a language seems to be urgently needed.

Labels: SemanticWeb