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

["Thomas B. Passin" <tpassin@home.com>]

[Lars Marius Garshol]

>
> * 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.
>

Well, the DAML+OIL folks have been depending on it and building out from it.
Recently there has been some discussion of a major disconnect (one of those
subtleties that the specialists understand but isn't immediately obvious to
the rest of us) that might make that impossible to continue if something
isn't changed.  So you could say that RDF Schema has some kind of reasonable
existence.  Anyway, it gives a framework for other efforts.

> 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.)
>

Maybe it's like C vs Python...

> 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.
>

Amen.

Cheers,

Tom P