At Flock I've become the
RDF
expert. It turns out, in the context of building on the Mozilla platform
RDF can be a really flexible, advanced and performant way of modelling
data and binding it to ui, however it can be very confusing. There's
some rules I've found come in handy:
-
There are no nodes. There are only arcs. Nodes only
exist in terms of being the source or target of an arc.
-
There are no arcs. We all agree to interpret RDF
triples as a directed graph, but really, they're just triples, just
statements.
-
There is no XML. Most of the time when we see a
representation of RDF triples its in a
serialized XML
form. There are many different, valid ways to express the same RDF
graph as XML. The tree of the XML document doesn't match the RDF graph
(usually). Don't try to treat RDF as XML.
I originally posted this in
my livejournal but it didn't
make sense to most of my non-technical readers, and probably not much
sense to most of my technical readers. Hence this blog.