[rdfweb-dev] Catching up and moving forward

[Dan Brickley]

Hi Shelley,

(listadministrivia: your mail client doesn't seem to have distinguished 
your text from Marc's; I've trimmed the reply to avoid confusion)

* Shelley Powers <shelleyp at burningbird.net> [2003-07-23 10:42-0500]

>   Marc, why isn't your programmer using any one of a several different
> RDF/XML parsers and APIs? He doesn't need to create this from scratch, and
> any extension to FOAF via another vocabulary must also be valid RDF/XML.

Marc mentioned that Eric Sigler is doing this work,
http://esigler.2nw.net/about/ and Eric's on the record as knowing the
RDF ropes, eg http://esigler.2nw.net/blog/archives/000046.html so I
doubt he'll be reinventing stuff that already exists.

I tried outlining RDF parsers etc in my reply just now. I suspect Marc 
isn't used to the details of the RDF toolkit stack, and 
from an XML perspective it would be natural to worry about their 
being lots of different ways of saying the same thing in XML. I'm 
sympathetic, remembering a time when I had no use for RDF parsers either :)

Marc, basically we're in a much nicer situation now than 2-3 years ago.
Find an RDF library in your chosen language, learn its quirks and
features and off you go. These days, someone starting out building 
RDF apps has a pretty nice set of toolkit libraries to choose from, 
opensource, actively maintained etc. They may not be perfect yet but 
they do give people a healthy productivity jump from trying to do it 
all themselves. Shelley's book has a very handy roundup
of such things, well worth a look... I also recommend working through 
http://www.semanticplanet.com/2003/05/parsingFOAFWithPHP.html to get a 
sense for how this stuff shows up in code. In particular, notice that 
the 'Listing the Relationships Between People' code samples are
completely agnostic about the XML form of the data. 

Hope this helps,

cheers,

Dan