Talk:Resource Description Framework

Self-reference

Per Avoid self-references, should this article really link to an RDF dump of Wikipedia's contents (under the "RDF Files" section)? – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 04:20, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

It is an example of self-reference, but much milder than the examples given in Wikipedia:Avoid self-references. Its removal would not detract much. If you feel bothered by it, remove it. cygri 20:12, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

I am removing it. However, Example 2 is more serious self-reference problem and should be removed if someone can write a good second example (I don't have the technical knowledge of RDF to do it); the first simple one is not enough. However, there is a world of examples to choose from, which makes a WP article a particularly poor choice. One reason for the Wikipedia:Avoid self-references policy is that it makes WP look amateurish and therefore less authoritative. EB doesn't do it in the many articles where it could use itself as an example. Finell (Talk) 21:33, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

Is there an external reference that uses Wikipedia as RDF somehow? Drf5n 15:48, 2 November 2007 (UTC)

Planet RDF

I added a link to planetrdf.com since that site really is the hub of all RDF-related development. Subsequent edit took it out citing policy against linking to blogs. I'd contest that - planetrdf.com is an aggregator for RDF-related news and is central to the RDF community. Omitting it seems detrimental to this article. – Ian Davis

The site was described as a blog aggregator, and per Wikipedia:External links blogs are normally to be avoided. If you feel that this link is important, I won't oppose you adding it again, but I would appreciate it if you would explain here in some detail how it is important to the article. That would also help if somepne else comes along and also sees that it is a blog. -- Donald Albury 01:10, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

Here comes someone else in support of Ian, and re-insertion of the link to Planet RDF. RDF community is a reality, and Planet RDF is a hub for this community. I understand why links to blogs should generally be avoided (they often provide non-neutral, biased or extreme viewpoints), but since Planet RDF is aggregating many blogs, this makes for multiplicity of viewpoints. universimmedia 07:36, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

(Disclosure: Ian Davis, universimmedia, and me are all syndicated at Planet RDF.) Is a blog search engine a blog? No. Neither is a blog aggregator. The link should be in the article. Planet RDF is the most substantial source of RDF-related news and includes almost all of the important voices of the RDF community, including several members of the W3C's working groups that have developed RDF. The policy cited above explicitly does not apply to sources “written by a recognized authority”. Since Planet RDF is an aggregator of more than 50 sources, it is very different in nature from a single-author blog, and I do not see how the cited policy applies. (I leave it to someone else to re-add the link because of the obvious conflict of interest.) cygri 20:07, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

RDF data model vs. RDF/XML syntax

The article should discuss the difference between the RDF data model (a.k.a RDF Abstract Syntax) and the RDF/XML syntax. As it stands, the article mostly discusses the data model, but the file format infobox refers to the RDF/XML syntax, and the term RDF/XML is used throughout the article without the necessary introduction. cygri 09:05, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

Can't Add References?

I've attempted to add a reference in the Criticism of RDF section but the wiki is not creating a reference section. Can anyone fix this?Clan-destine 23:53, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

The filling-in of the references section is automatic, but you still have to create a stub for it. I just created one by adding the following to the article, above the "See also" section:

==References==

{{subst:Reflist}}

The Reflist template fills in the actual code, the crucial bit of which is <references/> —mjb 02:31, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

other examples

I'm new to RDF, but it seems this is another way of expressing a function based relationship. Given the article's example:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Benn> <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/publisher> "Wikipedia"

it could be expressed as y = f(x):

"Wikipedia" = http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/publisher( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Benn )

and since y = f(x) is commonly expressed in various ways in computer code, wouldn't an example like this be useful in helping convert specialized jargon to a mathematical-like language that transcends written language, such as English?

---

anonymous-pion —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.237.190.111 (talk) 12:00, 15 September 2007 (UTC)

Literals in subject position

RDF does not allow literals to occur in subject position. Therefore the very first example of this article stating that "the sky" is blue cannot be expressed in this way. Instead one would have to associate a URI with the concept "sky". I don't want to mess up the introduction, but this should be corrected. Brezenbene 16:31, 2 November 2007 (UTC)

Well it says a 'subject denoting "the sky" '... so it is not false, actually. But a little confusing, because one might think of literals. I guess we can delete my comment above. Brezenbene 16:34, 2 November 2007 (UTC)

No, I think your comment is very important. The article says that subjects must be URIs but there is absolutely no discussion of: "What is the URI for 'sky'?". This must be very confusing for any newcomer. I think the (sky, is, blue) example should be elaborated, and written in full with URIs. I have no idea what the URI for 'sky' would be, but if I want to actually express that the sky is blue, how would I then write it? If the exmample is too ridiculous maybe another example should be used, e.g.: "Berlin is in Germany" which must be smth that somebody would want to express. 85.101.129.75 (talk) 22:15, 12 January 2012 (UTC)

Added Notes and rearranged references

I added a Notes section to gather footnotes and moved the W3C links into the references section. StephenReed 17:05, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

Microsoft

Another article claimed that Microsoft contributed to the initial development, but no reference was cited. Is this true? -- Beland (talk) 05:18, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Criticisms?

Hi, I'd like to see the criticisms section made more substantial. Expanding it into narrative form and going into a bit of depth for each criticism/counter-criticism would be highly educational and enrich this article's value in terms of encyclopedia content. I'm not qualified to do this (I don't know much about RDF) but I do not that there must be additional criticisms ("Are billions of tuples a feature or a bug?", authenticity, ambiguity, provenance, etc.) that would be helpful to include here. -- Joebeone (Talk) 12:35, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

The criticism section is essential and needs considerable expansion. I'm not concerned with the issues of verbosity, but I'm involved in concrete applications where provenance, authentication, security, access are required and complex. A single triple expands into perhaps dozens of statements about its reification. RDFa supports all of this, but support is rare among tools and libraries - maybe even non-existent. Without this support, tracking of provenance is, in theory, possible, but everyone would have to do it "by hand", with the ensuing chaos and duplication of effort. -- Deeptext (Talk) 17:35, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

Today I deleted the entire section. The one reference it had is no longer functioning and was not archived at the Internet Archive, as far as I can tell. Recently added material about 'reinvention of the wheel' and PROLOG's support for triples really isn't criticism, since RDF wasn't claiming to have invented or perfected the semantic triple, and RDF and PROLOG aren't directly comparable.

Furthermore, to address some of your points above, the fact that RDF is not the right tool for every knowledge representation job, or is not a complete knowledge representation system unto itself, just means RDF is no different than any other technology. Some tech is good at some things, not so good at others. It's like "criticisms of toothbrushes: they don't get between teeth as well as dental floss, and they're just reinventions of the toothpick, and to get my teeth really clean I have to go to the dentist" — true statements, perhaps, but ultimately a comparison of apples and oranges, not a valid criticism of the toothbrush, per se.

More importantly, Wikipedia cannot be the first place criticisms are published. If you can find already-published sources for criticisms, you can summarize and cite them here. They should meet Wikipedia's criteria for reliable sources, though, so random blog posts probably aren't going to cut it. —mjb (talk) 23:59, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

I for one would *really* like to see a section on criticism. I'd like to understand whether this is snake oil and hype, or the best thing since sliced bread. As the article stands, I have no idea. Seeing criticisms--and critics--helps me understand that.

For example, fans often talk about how RDF is needed to make sense of the www. I think I can see how it would work if it existed, but have no idea how it could ever come to exist; an example dealing with kinds of Merlot wines certainly don't engender any confidence that this is practical. A criticism that dealt with how RDF triples are supposed to get build on the web scale would help.

But maybe my skepticism in the practicality of this notion is misplaced--a section on criticisms (with answers) would help me understand. Mcswell (talk) 19:53, 11 October 2011 (UTC)

Most of the RDF community have better things to be doing. Many of the amateur-hour alternatives (microformats for one) don't, so they produce more coverage here. It's also why en:RDF still has bogosities like "metadata" in the intro. WP:Notability is a very poor measure of notability.

If you want to see the leading edge and the interesting stuff, take a look at Protege (Stanford) and OWL work. Mind you, one of the more inane comments I've seen on WP was that OWL was being a success instead of RDF. Andy Dingley (talk) 20:12, 11 October 2011 (UTC)

"Most of the RDF community have better things to be doing." Sorry, I don't see what that has to do with the question of (re-)adding a section here on criticisms. I'm not asking the most of the RDF community to respond, I'm asking *someone* to respond so that those of us who are not insiders in the RDF community can read about this. After all, wikipedia is an encyclopedia for the world, not just for the RDF community.

I'm also not asking about leading edge stuff, nor what the RDF community finds interesting. I'm looking for why I--or anyone else not already into RDF--should find RDF to be interesting and practical. Mcswell (talk) 13:27, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

WP has been downright hostile to SemWeb experts so far, going so far as to threaten topic bans on the grounds that anyone who understood a topic thus has an impossible COI and so must be excluded. The obvious result is that the community most able to contribute is instead persuaded to ignore WP. Andy Dingley (talk) 13:55, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

Applications

In this section I can read: "Some uses of RDF include research into social networking. This is important because it could help governments keep track of terrorists cells."

Come on!! Seriously?! I'm trying to picture in my mind the Secretary of Defense urging to define a new URI for terrosists, so that they can uniquely described by an URI. Should a terrorist be a FOAF of rather an EOAF (Enemy Of A Friend)? But I think terrorists have friends too, so they might as well be described with FOAF...

Let's write something more verifiable, or in any case more suited to the scope on encyclopedia. Either put a valid reference (but i doubt you can find anybody in the world fighting terrorism by using RDF) or just delete this last sentence.

Squalho (talk) 22:02, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

Some one deleted the terrorism mentioning, maybe you, which is fine. But I want to add smth. Well, I'm not the most insightful, but since nobody else wrote, I will try. If you model all the relationships between citizens, that is just a very powerful piece of information. A big part of the discussions of potential applications of semantic web has been about FOAF, that you can model how people know eachother. If you had all this data you could run algorithms to find suspicious people with suspicious friends. It is a great tool to keep track of any part of the population: minority groups, political opposition, criminals, illegal marriages of conveniance, social fraud, mafia, money laundering, etc. And well also those political groups that some times turn to terrorism. I am absolutely sure that models of interpersonal links, like the Facebook graph, could be used by intelligence services to find e.g. "suspicious acting potential terrorists". And I even think they probably do it to some extent now. Exactly how the intelligence services would manage to put the entire population into a FOAF triple store, I don't know, but I'm sure they would like to, and I'm sure that they are looking into the possibilities 85.101.129.75 (talk) 22:27, 12 January 2012 (UTC)