A couple of people have asked me why the world needs RDF Templates? My current answer is that if we're asking people to use the RDF data model then we'd better have good, portable ways of specifying how to make use of the data in that model. RDF Templates will hopefully provide a vendor and language independent means of specifying data extraction from a triple store.

The more immediate and personal driver is that several of my current projects are running up against the same problem: serialisation of RDF data in a variety of formats. I've already mentioned placetime.com and semantic planet, but I'm also facing it at myRSS. myRSS essentially has a large triple store backend which is fed by the spider. The feeds outputs are produced by querying this store and writing out RSS 1.0, RSS 0.91, JavaScript, HTML and several other versions of the feed. This whole process could be simplified if I could apply an RDF Template to a specific node for each feed and let the RDFT processor do all the hard work of queryign and traversing the graph.

2 Comments

1. Have not read the docs on your project yet.

   However, first impression is that this is pointing to a need for an RDF specific "XQuery" language, not the usual Squish derived stuff.

   The IsaViz project also had need of something similar to create GSS (Graph Stylesheets).

   I tried to create plain old BFS and DFS algorithms to walk RDF graphs, but gave it up; there really should be XSLT type of stuff for graphs. Like Grove pullers.

   Is this what RDFT is about?

   Comment by jbetancourt — 16 Sep 2003 @ 2:14 pm

2. Yes, this is exactly what RDFT is about - producing something with the convenience and power of XSLT but against an RDF graph rather than an XML tree.

   Comment by Ian Davis — 16 Sep 2003 @ 2:42 pm

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