Article:		Of Presidents and Ontologies
Subject:		Showing XML is misleading
Date:		2004-11-06 08:04:38
From:		bblfish
Response to: Showing XML is misleading
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.

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• Showing XML is misleading
  2004-11-06 08:32:42 bblfish [Reply]
  
  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.