xmlhack: RDF in a decade's perspective

Dan Brickley announced the release of Nodes and Arcs 1989-1999, an exploration of the links between RDF and the Web.

Brickley begins by exploring some pieces of Tim Berners-Lee's original proposal for what became the World Wide Web, examining its fundamental focus on the relationships between resources, and compares it to present-day RDF.

The challenges the Web was developed to solve are still largely unaddressed:

"The challenges faced by CERN in 1989 are common to many companies and organizations in 1999. We now have widespread access to Internet information sources, typically accessed via the World Wide Web. However, the WWW has not yet provided a solution to the challenges it was initially proposed to address."

Brickley sees RDF as a possible answer:

"The vast 'nodes and arrows' diagram that constitutes the current World Wide Web consists mostly of documents connected by links whose type is relatively meaningless (the label is "href", which merely means "links to"). With the development of RDF and XML, we can anticipate a richer Web in which these nameable interrelationships are modelled in RDF and written down in XML syntax using RDF and X-Link. "

Although this document is nearly a year old, many of the questions it addresses are still open, and its recent publication may bring new readers to the questions.