XDI folks: highly recommended reading about RDF (especially Dan & Steve)

[Drummond Reed <drummond.reed@xdi.org>]

In researching RDF for the XDI addressing diagrams that I'm working on (which explain why the RDF graph model does not support full addressability), I ran across this outstanding diagnosis of the 3 biggest problems with RDF. It is a series of 3 blog posts done in mid-2011:

1. http://milicicvuk.com/blog/2011/07/14/problems-of-the-rdf-model-blank-nodes/
   
2. http://milicicvuk.com/blog/2011/07/16/problems-of-the-rdf-model-literals/
3. http://milicicvuk.com/blog/2011/07/19/ultimate-problem-of-rdf-and-semantic-web/
   

They are very well written and illustrated. What I particularly appreciated is how they explain why RDF seems so complicated while some (but not all) aspects of XDI seem so much simpler. Although it may spoil the punch line, here are my one-line summaries of how XDI solves the 3 major problems with RDF addressed in these articles:

1. First article: XDI has no blank nodes.
2. Second article: XDI literal nodes are all uniquely addressable and typing of literal nodes is done consistent with the XDI graph model.
3. Third article: the types of nodes in an XDI graph are very precisely defined (see https://wiki.oasis-open.org/xdi/GraphModelStructure).