Re: [topicmaps-comment] RE: OASIS vs W3C

[Lars Marius Garshol <larsga@garshol.priv.no>]

* Thomas B. Passin
| 
| Another potential difference is the support each system gives for
| ontology and logic building.  Here, RDF has RDF Schemas, while Topic
| Maps has nothing but some PSIs so far.

I'm not sure to what extent RDF actually 'has' RDF Schema. RDF Schema
is a candidate recommendation, and has been for more than a year. From
what I hear work on it has been stopped. This is just a rumour,
though, and if anyone has more information I'd be happy to hear it.

For topic maps work has started on TMCL, which will be the topic map
equivalent of RDF Schema. At the moment, all we have is a requirements
document and a strawman proposal. Hopefully we will get at least one
serious proposal before long.

As for the original question: what RDF and topic maps do better than
each other, I can only agree that the answer to this is less clear
than it ought to be. I trying to work this out for myself, but so far
a major part of the problem has been that I don't know what anyone
would use RDF for. (I'm not saying it's useless, just that I am not
very clueful about practical applications of it.)

I hope the community can work out the answer to this question, because
I think it would be very good for topic maps if we could answer it.
It's not very good for credibility if we don't have an answer to this.

--Lars M.