An XML Schema Approach from Dan Connolly on 2001-02-22 (www-rdf-comments@w3.org from January to March 2001) (original) (raw)

The grammar in the RDF 1.0 spec is informal; it's not something you can feed to lex/yacc and get an implementation out of.

In Feb 2000, Rick Jelliffe sketched an XML Schema for RDF. In August last year, I started using it with XSV to do online validation of RDF documents. I wrote up some notes in:

RDF Syntax: An XML Schema Approach in progress Aug 2000 http://www.w3.org/2000/07/DAML-0-5-syntax

esp http://www.w3.org/2000/07/rdf.xsd

I suggest this sort of thing be used in stead of an informal grammar when/if the RDF 1.0 spec is clarified/revised.

It would probably create clutter in the spec to use XML Schema syntax right in the text of the spec, so I suggest using something ala

A meta-grammar for describing XML-based formats Bert Bos; 1, 8 Feb 1999 http://www.w3.org/People/Bos/meta-bnf

in the spec; the XML Schema could be mechanically generated from that ala

A Conversion tool from DTD to XML Schema http://www.w3.org/2000/04/schema_hack/

(hmm... we could model the grammar in RDF while we're at it. But transforming XML Schemas to RDF and back is a topic for another message...)

-- Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/

Received on Thursday, 22 February 2001 16:30:41 UTC