RDF doesnt have anything to do with XML. Showing it as XML is plain misleading, is bad pubblicity. RDF/XML syntax is highly unreadable.. RDF is a GRAPH is should be shown as such (yes i know, rdf visualizers are that great but..) or in simpler non XML notations.
It is weird that you should say that RDF is difficult. The example chosen above, and the way it has been serialised in XML shows exactly the opposite. A good XML serialisation of RDF is nearly indistinguishable from normal run of the mill XML -- so it seems to me anyways.
In fact I'd like to elaborate a little on my remark. What is really different between rdf and normal, well thought out XML? I think this would be worth an article on XML.com.
The way to show this would be to go in the opposite direction from the one usually presented, which goes to show how one can use all the cool RDF features. I think it would be worth an article for example to show how far one car remove all the odd rdf elements to get to something people could not tell apart from well designed XML.
In the example above for example you could specify in the OWL ontology that bushes e-mail address is an inverse functional property. As a result instead one could have:
<Human>
<FullName>Bush, George W.</FullName>
<NickName>Dubya</NickName>
<EMail>George.W.Bush@Whitehouse.gov</EMail>
...
</Human>
without the RDF about stuff.
It would be really interesting to list all the other ways one can write an OWL ontology in such a way that a person reading the XML would not be able to tell that he was looking at RDF, or at least reduce the differences so much as to show that the "RDF is hard to read" to be complete nonsense.
I agree that the XML serialization is more complex than other notations and less than ideal, but I don't think using it is misleading. While it's true that RDF != XML, this is XML.com, not RDF.com, and the readers are used to thinking in XML. Also, much of what is being discussed in the series relates to converting XML and HTML into RDF, using XSLT to generate the RDF. In those cases, it is much simpler to output the XML serialization of RDF from our conversion routines than any alternate notation. Finally, when the information is released to the world for download, it will be in the XML serialization of RDF.
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