On Tue, Mar 07, 2006 at 12:41:37PM -0800, John Sowa wrote:
> ... And I'd like to thank Mike for the following point:
>
> > I'm expecting John Sowa to chip in here, but I will save him the
> > trouble...
> >
> > So in what sense is RDFS more advanced than RDBs/SQL?
>
> I would concede one point: the typed version of RDF does recognize
> types, which Ted Codd proposed about 30 years ago for RDBs, (01)
John, what is the "typed version of RDF"? I don't know of any division
of RDF(S) into typed and untyped versions. Moreover, the semantics of
RDF is extraordinarily weak, and comes nowhere close to the expressive-
ness of Codd's relational calculus (as I'm sure you know); it can't even
handle >2-place relations (except in a limited and kludgy way). (02)
> but which still aren't in the SQL standard. But for performance,
> reliability, security, etc., RDF & OWL are still infants compared to
> RDBs, which run the world economy, both now and for a long time to
> come. (03)
This is apples and oranges, isn't it? Talking about reliability and
security, and maybe even performance, with respect to RDF/OWL is a lot
like talking about them wrt, say, Peano Arithmetic. RDF and OWL are
theories in a certain language designed to exploit the infrastruture of
the web and, in the case of OWL DL, the decidability of certain
description logics. Reliability and security, and to a certain extent,
performance, are orthogonal issues. (04)
Chris Menzel (05)
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