“Any RDF hackers out there want to add anything?”
The two analogies that seem to working for me lately. First, for WS-types; compare RDF to having a standard messaging envelope. Envelopes get you extensibility, uniformity, tracking, and so on. RDF gives you similar kinds of leverage for data. Second; everyone does property-value pairs, RDF just asks to name the thing the pair applies to and where possible use global keys. This seems to make sense to programmers.
I’m no RDF hacker, but your pitch, Ian’s article, Bill de h
I’m a bit late commenting on this one, as I’ve been busy getting a new product build ready, but now that that is out of the way I think its worth chiming in with this:
It _is_ (not just would be) a nice environment to work in, and not just for semi-theoretical “out there” projects – my company has used RDF in exactly this capacity for the last two years to power our data integration product at every level, from configuration files through schemata for processed data right on up to management information.
Too often I’ve heard RDF pundits say (or being said to have said) that “the tools will save us.” Too often I’ve heard RDF haters use the phrase against RDF. Its time both parties recognize that the tools are here, they are real, and they work very well indeed.
Heck, I’d go so far as to say the tools are generally _mature_, assuming that our two years of use in a practical real-world business application counts towards maturity.
Lost Boy 
I tried this advocacy approach last year – avoiding all the semantic web fluff and focussing on RDF as a data model (http://www.semanticplanet.com/2003/04/rdfForModularExtensibleMarkup.html)
“Any RDF hackers out there want to add anything?”
The two analogies that seem to working for me lately. First, for WS-types; compare RDF to having a standard messaging envelope. Envelopes get you extensibility, uniformity, tracking, and so on. RDF gives you similar kinds of leverage for data. Second; everyone does property-value pairs, RDF just asks to name the thing the pair applies to and where possible use global keys. This seems to make sense to programmers.
I’m no RDF hacker, but your pitch, Ian’s article, Bill de h
I’m a bit late commenting on this one, as I’ve been busy getting a new product build ready, but now that that is out of the way I think its worth chiming in with this:
It _is_ (not just would be) a nice environment to work in, and not just for semi-theoretical “out there” projects – my company has used RDF in exactly this capacity for the last two years to power our data integration product at every level, from configuration files through schemata for processed data right on up to management information.
Too often I’ve heard RDF pundits say (or being said to have said) that “the tools will save us.” Too often I’ve heard RDF haters use the phrase against RDF. Its time both parties recognize that the tools are here, they are real, and they work very well indeed.
Heck, I’d go so far as to say the tools are generally _mature_, assuming that our two years of use in a practical real-world business application counts towards maturity.