I agree that a lot of the standards surrounding RDF are ugly. I've always particularly disliked the RDF-as-XML serialization, which took two fairly simple ideas (triples and XML) and combined them into a complex mess. This is why I always hate parsing RSS 1.0. Also, the full generality of OWL just confuses me: It seems to be Prolog done badly.
But just as with XML, it's possible to ignore the cruft (XQuery, XLink, XML Schema, the current SOAP flavor-of-the-month), and just use the useful bits. A similar argument could be made about HTML: For every HTML 5, there's an XHTML 2.0.
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Hey, I really wish that "subject/predicate/object" was all that RDF was, but I'm afraid it's a good deal more:
RDF Syntax: http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-rdf-syntax-grammar-20040210/
RDF Schema: http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-rdf-schema-20040210/
RDF Semantics: http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-rdf-mt-20040210/
(Those are all current W3C standards)
I agree that a lot of the standards surrounding RDF are ugly. I've always particularly disliked the RDF-as-XML serialization, which took two fairly simple ideas (triples and XML) and combined them into a complex mess. This is why I always hate parsing RSS 1.0. Also, the full generality of OWL just confuses me: It seems to be Prolog done badly.
But just as with XML, it's possible to ignore the cruft (XQuery, XLink, XML Schema, the current SOAP flavor-of-the-month), and just use the useful bits. A similar argument could be made about HTML: For every HTML 5, there's an XHTML 2.0.
Agreed. You can get all the benefits of RDF while eschewing the stupid parts. Just because something has a spec doesn't mean you have to use it.
The full XML spec, for example, is insanely complicated. But people still derive value from it by utilizing a more or less sane subset.
You don't have to use all of that stuff though. "Stuff" layers on progressively to add functionality.