(2002-05-17) d

Kendall Grant Clark examines whether the in-draft RDF Primer is properly focused to achieve is evangelical purposes, which he thinks it crucial for improving adoption of RDF. While the most obvious use of a framework for asserting resource descriptions is metadata, the problem is that the metadata applications are the most obvious; hence, they're the ones mostly likely to have occurred to anyone who knows anything about RDF... Far more interesting and non-obvious is the intelligent routing discussion, and I'd like to see more discussion of RDF applications like that, and a bit less about metadata... Lastly, Section 8, presently called "RDF as Data Model" promises to be the hidden gemstone of the Primer. If I understand correctly what it promises to become, it is precisely the sort of substantive discussion which can communicate the value of RDF in a way which fires the imagination and stokes enthusiasm. A discussion of the relation of RDF to relational data storage technology is particularly crucial, since it not only reaches potential users where they live, so to speak, but also hints at one of RDF's potential uses, namely, as an application-specific data model layer, which may or may not be stored in an RDBMS.