I think the next steps for RDF Templates is to enable the round-tripping of RDF/XML. Is there a practical reason for doing this you might ask? Well, the reason I came up with RDF Templates in the first place was to solve a problem I had with placetime.com and Semantic Planet's source directory. Both of these services output HTML and RDF representations of the same things and both tie themselves in knots getting the right information out. With placetime I want to automatically incorporate RDF from other entities, e.g. the start and end instants of an interval. I could do this very easily if I just build an in-memory RDF model, add the triples I need from a query and use RDF Templates to generate the HTML and RDF/XML versions.

RDF Templates has a way to go before it's expressive enough to be able to serialise a graph as RDF/XML. Here's my starting list of what needs to be done:

• node labels — there has to be some way of getting a string representation of the node label.
• literal languages — likewise, there has to be a way of accessing the language of a literal.
• namespaces — it has to be possible to output elements and attributes with namespaces.
• xml encoding — need to be able to specify the output encoding in a similar way to XSLT.
• variables — I suspect, but don't know for sure, that the stylesheet will need to have some context passed around. This means variable or param elements perhaps.

I need to mull this over a bit and see if there's anything I've missed. The best way to see is probably to try writing the stylesheet and see what walls I hit.

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