A problem of semantic web: not providing XML value

Today in the morning, I had a sudden “insight” about one of the problems of RDF and Semantic Web: it misses some of the value that XML offers. This is what my daily commuting bike ride is for, thinking…

The adoption of Semantic Web rises and falls with the adoption of it in standardization bodies. For example the Oil&Gas industry of Norway is thinking about Semantic Web, and I have recently been talking with people from the automotive supplier industry about Semantic Web. To interchange data in a business-to-business environment you would expect that RDF has more features than XML, but in fact, it doesnt.

  • RDF is less expressive than XML. One example: you can’t define pattern in RDF. Look in the XML spec, there is much more of it missing in RDF.
  • RDF is not validated. Although in theory, it is possible to validate a file for semantic correctness, nobody does that because of the open world assumption. Hence, there is no validation of the XML in mainstream applications.

So, if you are an industry, you already havean XML based standard, moving to RDF without the expressiveness of XML and without the notion of validation is tricky. RDF should have more features, not less.

Also the stack of XML technologies must be embraced better, for example a XSLT-friendly RDF/XML serialization. Please, dear reader, solve these problems and make a company around it.

One Reply to “A problem of semantic web: not providing XML value”

  1. The critique is: nobody validates RDF and there is no pressure nor tools to validate.

    In theory… everything is possible, of course, but that does not help anyone buying a RDF validator or stopping people from writing

    <http://www.example.com> rdf:type "muahahaha".
    

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