Article:		Building a Semantic Web Site
Subject:		An Approach to the Semantic Web
Date:		2001-05-09 17:14:42
From:		Scott Tsao
This is the first article I have read that gives fair and equal treatment to RDF and XTM. (Are there any other that I missed?) As a potential implementor and user of those SW technologies, I am not as interested in exactly HOW to use those technologies, as to WHAT is the business scenarios the author had in mind (examples in French did not help much ;-). Therefore, I would hope the author could provide a sequel to this article outlining the scenarios (or use cases) one could follow when accessing his Semantic Web Site. Assuming we do have these scenarios (or use cases), one could then ask this question: WHICH technology can best solve the problem at hand (perhaps by stepping through the use cases)? The impression I got while reading the article was ... it all depends ... one could use either RDF or XTM in most of the cases. For RDF, the benefit may come from the fact that RSS is RDF-compliant, and there are existing tools available for queries. For XTM, the benefit may come from the easiness for semantic discovery and enrichment (e.g., discovering topics and adding associations). And, as we expand on the scenarios, we could probably find areas that neither RDF nor XTM fit the bill. Then perhaps we would resort to some other technologies (e.g., DAML+OIL) to get to where we want to be. What I am proposing here is to look at those "SW technologies" through a different lens, not from the technologist's perspective, but from the end-user's perspective. I think the myriad SW-related articles flooding our screens today are mostly from the former, but very few from the latter. I would encourage people continue to write SW-related articles but preferably following this outline: 1. What is the business problem? 2. What is the proposed business solution? (senarios and use cases) 3. What are the potential technical approaches? 4. Which technical solution works best and why? 5. How can the proposed technical solution be developed and implemented? 6. What are the available standards and tools (if any)? Any thoughts? Regards, Scott Tsao The Boeing Company

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• An Approach to the Semantic Web
  2001-05-10 01:54:51 Eric van der Vlist [Reply]
  
  I will try to give this sequel keeping a "fair and equal treatment to RDF and XTM"...

  
  As a preamble, I would say that the availability and quality of the meta information is more important than the serialization format (RDF, XTM or any other).

  
  I see RDF and XTM as belonging to different levels, though and believe they should be more complementary than competing.

  
  RDF is a very generic syntax to express facts as triples while XTM is an application describing "Topic Maps", i.e. the relations between topics and between topics and resources.

  
  I believe that XTM could have used a RDF syntax, however since it is not the case with XTM 1.0 we have to make a choice and, I think that it depends on the application you want to build and the tools you want to use.

  
  If your application is all about describing topics and relations between topics and resources you might want to use XTM and the tools that are available to build Topic Maps.

  
  On the other hand, if you want to consolidate information between applications and, for example, link your site summary with annotations and conformance tests, the generic RDF model should be much easier to use since triples from different sources do merge automatically when you load them.

  
  Developing new applications with XTM is of course possible (many papers have been published for instance to show how Topic Maps may be used to represent knowledge bases) but requires to put on "topic maps lenses" and to consider everything as Topic Map objects (i.e. topics, associations or occurrences) and that's not always very natural.

  
  The border line I would personally draw is then very simple: if you need a Topic Map, then go for XTM, but if you want something more extensible, consider using RDF. And keep in mind that if you've taken care to include enough information, you will always be able to transform RDF into XTM or XTM into RDF.