Following some series of links from Simon St. Laurent's site (http://www.simonstl.com), I've been spending a few moments at Norm Walsh's new (to me) (ca. this spring, looks like?) "pseudo-blog" website, which is full of RDF and interesting ideas (par for the course for Norm "DocBook" Walsh).
This one I thought worth clipping:
"Metadata wins again"
http://norman.walsh.name/2003/08/21/metadata
"On more than one occasion, I've been saved by the fact that I can influence the publication through no more than the addition of metadata"
-- gives one example of being pleasantly surprised by auto-magically getting the lone .GIF on his site to be handled/processed by the metadata he thought he'd set up for .JPGs description only...
-- in another example "he [realizes that the] RSS feed, like everything else, just comes from the metadata!" and for the price of a quick snippet of RDF he gets the RSS listing he wants, without the onus of having to create a (real, non-metadata) placeholder article.
Concluding remark:
"This metadata stuff, it's got legs."
+++++++++++++++++++++++++
Wm.
P.S. "On the other hand..."
Then again I have to note Simon St. Laurent's just-the-other-day "rant" on "Why I Don't Like RDF"
http://simonstl.com/articles/RDF.html (Aug. 2003)
"URIs identify resources, which are sort of whatever you want or I want or whatever URI owners want if they can be bothered to communicate it. The understandings of the division of labor between server and browser regarding things like fragment identifiers have been tossed out in favor of nonsense about magic hashes (#) signalling a difference between representation and abstract ideas."
[re: XSLT as a help] "The XML world has frequently deluded itself into thinking that agreement-by-committee can solve its communications problems, but at the same time it has hedged its bets with transformation practices that let developers get from vocabulary A to vocabulary B just in case the big-picture designs [a la RDF] aren't quite what was needed."
"RDF has managed to inflict its assumptions on XML enough (largely through namespaces) that there are periodic efforts to convince XML users to put themselves in the RDF straitjacket. Rather than merely accepting the constraints of trees, these people suggest, developers would be wise to subject their content to the constraints of trees and graphs simultaneously"
He does link to his own (older) "What's right with RDF"
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/2322 (Nov. 2002)
but that has some qualified statements of interest, too.
"RDF is excellent at addressing a particular set of problems. The Resource Description Framework's primary approach is description. XML often presents something (a document, a table) directly; RDF more typically presents a description of something, not the thing itself"