From structure to semantics
10/16/2005; 1:29:08 AM
XR (XML -> RDF) is a transformation format that indicates how RDF can be extracted from a certain XML format. Once a transformation for a certian XML format is defined, RDF can be automatically extracted from every XML file in that format.
It is clear that few people find RDF easy to understand. Creating a tranformation to RDF adds another level of complexity. So XR will probably be usable by a small number of people. This is not a problem, because only one transformation has to be defined for each XML format.
Required knowledge for XR is the RDF model and XPath. Because almost everyone doesn't like the standard RDF/XML syntax, XR uses it's own simplified RDF/XML syntax. The tutorial will first show how to create RDF in this format, and then show how to adapt the static RDF to an XML to RDF transformation by adding XPath expressions.
To perform an XR transformation, it is first converted to an XSLT tranformation. This is done with another XSLT transformation. The execution of the transformation above is done with this perl script.