[seek-kr-sms] on integrating EML and OWL metadata

[Serguei Krivov]

We were discussiong the  options for integrating OWL and EML and once
Matt mentioned 
that since XML format was a big selling point, converting EML to OWL
would discourage current EML users.
I wanted to add to this part of discussion one point:
 
In fact it is possible to use OWL as pure XML language without having
any buiseness with the  unholy RDFS ;-):
Here is a link to XML non RDFS syntax for OWL:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/NOTE-owl-xmlsyntax-20030611/
 
This syntax is clear and nice comparing to RDFS based one. One could use
simple xml parser to ingest and validate it and use even XML-Spy to edit
it. There are 2 possible scenarios of using it for ecological metadata:
 
1.	Taking respective xml schemas for this sysntax (see
http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-xmlsyntax/apd-schema.html) and adding them as a
separate module to EML.
2.	Converting EML to OWL on semantic level
In both cases the metadata  would have clear XML- only based expression
and most of XML tools would be instrumental in this case. Of cource due
to complex one to many relation between  semantic and syntactic
expression in logic based languages (that Bertram mentioned at one
point),   XPath and XQuery would not be really useful with OWL metadata.
But on a briter side , mapping of this XML based syntax to RDBMS is far
easier, since it is just XML.
 
In case there is general interest, I would gladly implement support for
this syntax in GrOWL with Jena or without any API (which would decrease
the size of esd applet by  370 K)  I would also be interested in making
persistant storage, and query tailored for this syntax.
Please let me know what you think about it.
 
serguei
 
 
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