Comments on: Why RDF? http://blog.mozilla.com/axel/2006/10/20/why-rdf/ Free your mind and your ass will follow. Tue, 07 Feb 2012 10:14:33 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 By: Laurens Holst http://blog.mozilla.com/axel/2006/10/20/why-rdf/comment-page-1/#comment-9 Laurens Holst Sat, 21 Oct 2006 06:26:04 +0000 http://blog.mozilla.com/axel/2006/10/20/why-rdf/#comment-9 Basically, RDF is just a really convenient information storage system, without the restrictions of relational databases or tree-based datastructures (such as XML). You just say ‘I have this, and get me this property of it’. E.g. I have post 123 and get me all replies to it, and it just works. With an RDBMS you need to worry about architecture of tables and how they link together and such (table for this, table for that, primary key here, foreign key there, special intermediate tables if you want many-to-many relations, etc), and it is indeed not very interoperable, whereas in RDF shared voculaburies (data structures) and data are commonplace. Many people don’t realise this when they see RDF/XML, and think it’s just a really complicated way of doing something that can also be done in XML. But I don’t see why people would ever want to move from an RDF store to an RDBMS. If the code for the RDF functionality is old and outdated and not easy to use, it seems more logical to put effort in improving it. ~Grauw Basically, RDF is just a really convenient information storage system, without the restrictions of relational databases or tree-based datastructures (such as XML). You just say ‘I have this, and get me this property of it’. E.g. I have post 123 and get me all replies to it, and it just works.

With an RDBMS you need to worry about architecture of tables and how they link together and such (table for this, table for that, primary key here, foreign key there, special intermediate tables if you want many-to-many relations, etc), and it is indeed not very interoperable, whereas in RDF shared voculaburies (data structures) and data are commonplace.

Many people don’t realise this when they see RDF/XML, and think it’s just a really complicated way of doing something that can also be done in XML.

But I don’t see why people would ever want to move from an RDF store to an RDBMS. If the code for the RDF functionality is old and outdated and not easy to use, it seems more logical to put effort in improving it.

~Grauw

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