RE: [topicmaps-comment] Re: RDF/Topic Maps: what's an Application ?(was: Re: [topicmaps-c omment] RE: OASIS vs W3C)

["Tsao, Scott" <scott.tsao@boeing.com>]

From: Lars Marius Garshol
> [Lars Marius Garshol:]
> > 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.)
> [Scott Tsao:]
> | I am not sure if this statement in XML Service Description Working
> | Group Charter (Proposal): "The Working Group must use RDF for
> | providing any semantically significant information."  (see
> | http://www.w3.org/2001/09/wscp/canon.html) could be considered as a
> | practical application of RDF.
> 
> I guess it could, but my question was more "What would RDF do better
> than the alternatives?"  That is, for what kinds of applications would
> my needs be better served by RDF than they would by other technologies?

From my knothole, the question we need to find answer for is this:
"How can RDF and TM be best employed as core (complementary) technologies
to provide semantic markup for web services?"

As you may well aware, current adoption of XML in large corporations has
moved towards its capability to enable web services, through industry-wide
initiatives such as UDDI, WSDL, SOAP, and ebXML.  Also, semantic markup
for web services is a subject of emerging research (e.g., DAML-S, see
http://www.semanticweb.org/SWWS/program/full/paper57.pdf).  I think it is
very important for the RDF and TM communities to join force and work
together to address the "semantic" challenge brought forth by the web
services movement, because it will find broad support from the business
communities who need to transact business using those web services.

A testimonial of this phenomena can be seen from a recent EMIT (Enterprise
Migration to Internet Technologies) article:
========================================================================
INTEROPERABILITY ACROSS STANDARDS
 
 There are an ever increasing number of "standards" related to e-Business
that are emerging from multiple consortia. In an attempt to coordinate
across different standards groups, there will be a series of
Interoperability Summits during the next twelve months. 
http://www.oasis-open.org/news/oasis_news_08_14_01.shtml
 
  Even within consortia, there can be diverse standards with complex
dependencies. There have been some recent coordination activities within
groups. The W3C has formed a Technical Architecture Group that will help to
pull together Web architecture standards. http://www.w3.org/2001/07/19-tag
The Object Management Group has taken a cut at capturing dependencies among
standards http://www.omg.org/technology/documents/spec_catalog.htm
 
  One of the key issues for the future is how to systematically capture,
categorize and resolve dependencies and overlaps among standards.  These
include differences in representation languages (UML, XML, IDL) and
semantics even for similar representations. Some references include
http://www.charteris.com/mdl/Index.htm  and
http://www-db.stanford.edu/~melnik/rdf/uml/
========================================================================

I hope both the RDF and TM communities will seize this golden opportunity
and start working together!

Regards,

Scott